What happened to America’s covert coup-makers? If Latin America’s current populist/socialist hiccup were taking place a generation ago, we would be stuffing that hemisphere so full of Pinochets that human rights groups would have to take their eyes off that little slice of Cuba we use for the devil knows what.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s weekly column in The Wall Street Journal takes Latin American politics and politicians and tries to show its readers where our neighbors to the south are currently drifting. Lately her entries have read like a more self-aware version of journalist John Reed’s “Ten Days That Shook the World,” the classic first-person account of the triumph of Bolshevism in Russia. Last week, Ms. O’Grady observed that Ecuador’s recently sworn-in President Correa has joined the chorus of “no a los yanquis” that drives the Hugo Chavez/Fidel Castro fan club, or, as it is formally known, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. Who are the members and member-wannabes of this illustrious organization? Naturally, the ever self-appreciatory Venezuelan President Chavez is with Mr. Castro at the helm, and they are joined by Bolivia’s Evo Morales, who recently spat in Washington’s eye by promising to give more muscle to Bolivian cocaine production.

Mr. Morales is also in the news this week because Juan Carlos Ortiz, his appointee at the head of Bolivia’s recently nationalized natural gas company, resigned on Saturday. This marks the departure of the second energy chief in less than a year. While Bolivia and Venezuela — the two largest holders of gas reserves in South America — may be natural partners in energy autarky, the presence of their leaders at the inaugural festivities of Mr. Correa serves as an important reminder that Latin America’s anti-U.S. strongmen are eager to expand their coalition. So eager, evidently, that they were willing to humor the broken record of “historical” inquiries about the reality of the Holocaust from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was also in attendance at the swearing-in ceremony.

While Ms. O’Grady has been pointing to the gathering clouds of communism on the Latin American horizon, one threat to U.S. interests certainly exists in the here and now. Venezuela, which is dependent on the capital that comes from its #1 importer (the U.S.), nevertheless can make life difficult for Washington and Wall Street by injecting bursts of uncertainty into energy markets. In a report for the Council on Foreign Relations last November, Richard Lapper remarked that Venezuela’s state oil company has been busily renegotiating terms of trade with the U.S. and that recent changes exempt Caracas from filing with Washington’s Securities and Exchange Commission.

The inevitable failings in transparency that will result from such exemptions increase the unpredictability not merely of Venezuela’s production, but of energy markets as a whole. From the point of view of the market, the most worrisome part of Mr. Lapper’s report is in his account that, “on several occasions, [Chavez] has threatened to stop shipments of Venezuelan oil to the United States or close Venezuelan-owned refineries in U.S. territory.” In the early 1960s, such threatened and actual disruption of the U.S. economy by Castro’s Cuba predicated an aggressive policy culminating in the humiliation of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Chavez, who recently announced plans to nationalize telecommunications, is not Castro, just as Cingular is not Exxon, but it seems that something has indeed changed since the days of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Kissinger regarding U.S. policy with the southern hemisphere.

In any case, as long as the U.S.’s friends in the Saudi Oil Ministry plan to keep the markets competitive (an intention they announced yesterday), the potential of the Chavez regime to deliver oil shocks will be greatly reduced. Is this the going wisdom on Latin America’s populists — that they can say what they want as long as their influence in the energy sector is kept in check? Has the CIA, sometime in the last few decades, learned that the coup is not a delicate tool but a blunt object? Or are we simply waiting for an over-eager Pat Robertson to do our assassinations for us? Only time will tell, for at this writing, it cannot be predicted whether or where the populist wave in Latin America, which has not yet crested, is bound to break.

Peter Durning is a senior majoring in history and can be reached at pdurning@stanford.edu.