Last week, Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s co-president (last year he promoted his wife, Rosario Murillo, to share his presidency) announced the country would have no more elections. Apparently, Daniel and Rosario have decided to be dictators for life. Keeping it in the family, so to speak.

The autocratic pair are following a pattern all too common in Latin America, a pattern that can drive progressives to despair: promising revolutionaries throwing out the bad guys and then emulating them, evolving from democrat to autocrat.

Those with long memories will remember the Sandinista National Liberation Front, led by Ortega, overthrowing the brutal Somoza family dictatorship in 1979. The Sandinistas then won an election generally judged free and fair, and the country seemed on a course to join the world’s democracies.

The Sandinistas were voted out in 1990 but returned in 2006. This time Ortega decided not to take chances and began to rig elections. The Organization of American States and the European Union described the 2021 election as a sham. Now he has decided to end the farce and emulate his erstwhile enemies, the Somozas.

We could go even further back to Fidel Castro and his 1959 Cuban revolution. I, like a great many others, cheered as he deposed the dictator Fulgencio Batista and his American gangster confederates. The revolutionaries did much good, cleaning out a corrupt government and establishing excellent education and health systems.

But they also imposed a totalitarian state. Thousands fled the regime—today over a million Cuban exiles make the U.S. home. With the added burden of harsh American sanctions, Cuba struggles to merely survive.

Then there’s Venezuela. When Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998, he promised a Bolivarian Revolution that would bring social reform and a more equitable society. He and his Chavistas did institute progressive reforms on health, education and poverty. But they also instituted Cuban-inspired economic and political reforms which, under his successor Nicolás Maduro, have turned the former democracy into an autocracy and reduced the country to destitution. Over seven million Venezuelans have fled, creating one of the world’s greatest refugee problems.

Early this year, the U.S. invaded Venezuela, slaughtered a few dozen Cuban military personnel, and kidnapped Maduro and his wife. This might have offered promise of democratic restoration. There was, after all, a pre-eminent democrat waiting in the wings.

María Corina Machado, revered leader of the Venezuelan opposition, and winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, was more than ready to return to her country from exile and run for office. But that isn’t about to happen.

The Trump administration has made a cozy deal with Maduro’s Chavista successor, Delcy Rodriguez, to control Venezuela’s immense oil reserves, and that is much more compatible with Trump’s interests than democracy. The administration no doubt finds Rodriguez more amenable than the democracy-loving Machado.

Nonetheless, she may offer Venezuela the best hope out of these three benighted nations. For one thing, she’s a woman. She may be immune to the machismo that leads too many Latin (and other) men down the autocratic path. And having won the Nobel Peace Prize for her democratic efforts, she may feel obliged to keep the faith.

It would be a mountain to climb. The Chavista regime is still well-entrenched, tight with the military and supported by armed militias. Nonetheless its oppression and incompetence, highlighted by its shocking failure in dealing with the recent earthquakes, could very well precipitate a collapse. One can always hope.

She will probably also have to wait out the Trump administration. A lot of us are doing that.