Not who you're replying to, but sounds like Latin Americans are more familiar than the US by far with leftist populist dictators, Fidel Castro types... The cigar smoking kinda guys who inspired the game Tropico.
In the US, we teach that communism is a mortal enemy that only leads to starvation and we elect greedy oligarchs that promise life will get better eventually while they fill their pockets. Socialism is seen as the extreme anti-State solution where no one starves and everyone is educated. And any evidence to the contrary is considered conservative propaganda.
There's little room for nuance in the US. We went so far right that it feels like you have to move all the way left to fix things. And the more they call socialism the enemy, the better it sounds to people. The youth grow up thinking, either they support Trump or they're a socialist... He's probably doing more for socialism than American socialists ever did.
I swear just having free healthcare in the 90s could have prevented all this.