VENEZUELA PAYS THE PRICE FOR HATING CAPITALISM

When I interviewed Venezuela's populist presidential candidate in his beautiful apartment above Caracas in 1998, he never spoke of military measures, of Fidel's Cuba or of organizing new citizen militias.

In fact, the first thing an effervescent Hugo Chavez did was bring out an enormous map of his country and point to all of its most remote parts. These, he assured me, he would figuratively tie together with roads and highways in the "new Venezuela" that he would build.

When I pushed him on the questions of going the "Castro way" or even that of some native communism, he scoffed. "I am not a communist, not a fascist," the former army colonel said proudly. "I am a Bolivarian, whose ideology exists as an ideology of liberty.

"A model?" he asked. "There isn't any model -- certainly not Cuba or the Soviet Union. We don't copy other models; we invent them."

http://news.yahoo.com/venezuela-pays-price-hating-capitalism-230012367.html

Interesting commentary from a knowledgeable source.