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On Sunday, Venezuela goes to the polls. The likely triumph of Hugo Chávez, writes Daniel Hannan, reflects a phenomenon sweeping Latin America that feeds not on hope but on hatred

There aren’t really any proper dictators left in South America, but Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez is getting close. His first attempt at power was through an old-fashioned putsch. When this failed, he tried the ballot box, winning a more or less free election in 1998. Once in office, he quickly set about undoing the democratic system that had got him there. Previously autonomous institutions — parliament, the judiciary, the Catholic Church, employers’ federations, trade unions — were subverted. Private firms were expropriated, television stations obliged to broadcast approved programmes, and the constitution rewritten.

A proper caudillo, Chávez is authoritarian at home and aggressive abroad. He has a handful of overseas allies — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro, Muammar Gaddafi, Hu Jintao — but excoriates most foreign leaders as thieves, liars and dickheads. Yet on Sunday this chippy, belligerent ex-colonel expects to be re-elected with a landslide. His final election rally was a victory celebration, in which he dedicated his coming triumph to Castro, telling the roaring crowd, ‘Viva Cuba revolucionaria!’

Chávez has cause to be confident. He has stuffed the electoral commission with his placemen, commandeered chunks of the media and nationalised the company that runs the electronic voting system, thereby convincing many Venezuelans that their ballots will be identifiable.

Yet he would probably win anyway. His support owes something to the surge in oil revenues: as a Venezuelan aphorism has it, there are no good or bad presidents, just presidents when the oil price is high and when it is low. But Chávez’s success is not fuelled by petrol alone.