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U.S. President George W. Bush is about to begin a week of travel to Latin America. He has chosen to visit five countries that are on good terms with the United States in a region divided between countries that have chosen political populism and those that have chosen political moderation.

Though Latin America often is seen as being divided between left and right -- with the charismatic Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez leading the left -- the region can more accurately be divided between populist and moderate governments.

While all countries in the region claim to want greater regional integration and help for the poor, the populists (Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and, to some extent, Argentina) aim to provide for the general population by appropriating their natural resource wealth, while the moderates (Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Chile and, to some extent, Mexico) aim to thrive via commerce. Of these two groups, only Venezuela and Brazil aspire to shape the region as a whole.

Chavez is the populist movement's leading figure, though he neither created nor fully controls it. The rebirth of populism, which ideologically is tied to the region's socialist roots, was inevitable following widespread disillusionment with the neoliberal economic adjustments the International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposed during the 1990s in order to create macroeconomic stability. Although the measures managed to bring serious inflationary pressures under control, they did not resolve the region's notorious inequalities, and considerable resentment grew.

This led each country to one of two conclusions. The first was that the policies pursued by the IMF, the so-called "Washington Consensus," benefited multinational corporations, Washington and wealthy Latin American elites who served the first two -- meaning an entirely new approach was needed. This conclusion was most popular in places with a great deal of oil and mining wealth from which the public did not directly benefit -- Latin America's populist countries.