Cuba’s state-controlled press has just reported that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is proposing a new federation of “autonomous” nations in one big Bolivarian union. It’s a massive show of self-aggrandisement (for who would rule such an entity but Chavez himself?), but also an incredible call to regess to the failed past.

Chavez has dressed it up in the aggrieved language of preserving indigenous identity, something that makes sense from his point of view because he is most likely to entice into this the supporters of leaders like Evo Morales of Bolivia and Ollanta Humala of Peru, who have no knowledge of the Soviet empire. But indigenous-grievance appeal doesn’t disguise the fact that it’s the same concept Lenin had, when he and his commissars introduced to the world the Soviet Union.

The idea then was to gather up the states of the old czarist empire, plus a few small choice stealings from the western frontier and then declare each of them an ‘autonomous republic’ ruled from a centralized ideological center in the Kremlin. (Today, Chavez, an old line Marxist if you study his life carefully – this article in the Atlantic Monthly is useful for that – proposes the exact same structure, recrudesced for Latin American states that have ideologically aligned in some way, however lightly, with him.

Do I think this will go down like a lead balloon?

Yes.

Chavez already has proposed a ‘Bolivarian Alternative Of The Americas,’ something every nation in the Americas has walked, or rather, run, from – straight into the arms of Uncle Sam as nation after nation has signed free trade pacts with the U.S. – CAFTA, Peru, Colombia – and Ecuador asking the U.S. to come to the table.

Even Evo Morales in Bolivia and Tabare Vazquez in Uruguay, as well as the Caribbean states now seem desperate to sign free trade pacts with the U.S.

Meanwhile, Mexico and Chile are already contentedly onboard, making tons of money for themselves through access by permanent right to U.S. markets. Even radical leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico promises not to scrap the pact that has increased the size of Mexico’s economy fourfold.

It’s part of the evidence that we are living in the greatest era of free trade in history.

The other thing is: The U.S. is quietly supporting and nurturing democracies, treating them as friends even if their leaders are leftwing. Given that much of the Latin American public has high negatives of Chavez who projects belligerance and boorishness, this diplomatic effort is working.

Chavez knows this. So Chavez will make lots of promises of cash, and use money and muscle and sweet talk to lure these nations into this alternative “Soviet” arrangement.

It will fall flat because there’s too much awareness in Latin America about how free trade is literally the power of the people, breaking up old monopolies, giving consumers untold choices, and filling bank accounts of huge numbers of the poor (rather than party elites) – and all of it outside miserable dependence on government largesse subject to a supreme leader’s whim.

Chavez swears this new plan is not his failed ALBA and therefore everyone should agree with him and join this proposed union. On that I agree with him.

It’s worse. It’s a Latin Soviet Union.

Just watch as nation after nation in Latin America quietly tells Chavez to go to hell.