The Castro in Caracas

It’s a little after midnight in Caracas, and Hugo Chavez has just finished his weekly visit with the Venezuelan people. In tonight’s four-hour address, the president has blamed the country’s woes on the United States, the international capitalist system, Venezuela’s “rotten oligarchy” and “squalid elites,” bankers, coup plotters in Miami, “savage neoliberalism,” bad weather, and the recent shortage of full moons.

Welcome to the world of Hugo Chavez. It would be easy to dismiss Chavez as a character from a Woody Allen movie if the stakes weren’t so high and the consequences so grave. Recent defectors from the presidential palace accuse Chavez of supporting Hezbollah and al- Qaeda activists in Venezuela, and Chavez was one of the few heads of state to denounce the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. In 2000, he became the first Western leader since the Gulf War to pay a state visit to Saddam. (“Imagine what the Pharisees will say when they see me with Saddam Hussein,” he gloated.) Chavez has also imported hundreds of Cuban activists—he calls them “sports instructors”—to arm his thousands of civilian supporters in the “Bolivarian Circles,” a private militia that rivals the national police force.

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William S. Prillaman

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It’s a little after midnight in Caracas, and Hugo Chavez has just finished his weekly visit with the Venezuelan people. In tonight’s four-hour address, the president has blamed the country’s woes on the United States, the international capitalist system, Venezuela’s “rotten oligarchy” and “squalid elites,” bankers, coup plotters in Miami, “savage neoliberalism,” bad weather, and the recent shortage of full moons.

Welcome to the world of Hugo Chavez. It would be easy to dismiss Chavez as a character from a Woody Allen movie if the stakes weren’t so high and the consequences so grave. Recent defectors from the presidential palace accuse Chavez of supporting Hezbollah and al- Qaeda activists in Venezuela, and Chavez was one of the few heads of state to denounce the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. In 2000, he became the first Western leader since the Gulf War to pay a state visit to Saddam. (“Imagine what the Pharisees will say when they see me with Saddam Hussein,” he gloated.) Chavez has also imported hundreds of Cuban activists—he calls them “sports instructors”—to arm his thousands of civilian supporters in the “Bolivarian Circles,” a private militia that rivals the national police force.