Hugo Chavez has gone through more chiefs of staff than Venezuela has had Miss Universes — which is quite a few. So when the Venezuelan President tapped his older brother Adan for the job last year, few outside Miraflores Palace took notice. They should have. Adan, since then appointed education minister, is Hugo's chief Marxist consultant — and a driving force behind Chavez's harder-than-usual left turn since his re-election last month. Chavez has announced plans to shut down an opposition-run TV network and nationalize Venezuela's largest telephone and electricity firms, while pushing his rubber-stamp Congress to allow him to run for re-election indefinitely and rule by decree well into 2008. It's no wonder Chavez watchers compare Adan to Latin America's other conspicuous First Brother, Raul Castro, who would succeed Fidel.
To many in Washington, the emergence of Adan is one more reminder of Chavez's autocratic urges — and of the possibility that Chavez himself is Fidel Castro's real successor in Latin America. His nationalization scheme evokes the seizure of private businesses in Cuba after Castro's 1959 communist revolution: it ousts U.S.-based companies like Verizon, part-owner of the Venezuelan telecom giant CANTV, and the AES Corporation, which controls Venezuela's main power utility. Chavez asserted this week that while he'll compensate both U.S. firms, he won't pay them a market rate. And when the Bush Administration raised concerns about his burgeoning presidential powers, Chavez replied, in his usual charming fashion, "Go to hell, gringos!"
Yet, by objective standards, Chavez is still not Castro. Says one Chavez official, "We're a hell of a long way from a [Castro-style] regime." Chavez gushingly admires and subsidizes Castro. But many officials in Caracas, especially younger ones, wince when you equate the two. They insist their democratically elected commandante is hardly poised to snuff out free speech and free enterprise or stoke armed revolution abroad. Chavez may control the hemisphere's largest oil reserves, but they believe he can't afford to squander a more valuable commodity — his democratic legitimacy, something Castro never had and which gives Chavez the ability to blunt U.S. efforts to cast him as the Caribbean's new communist caudillo.
Source: Is Chavez Becoming Castro? -- Thursday, Jan. 25, 2007 -- Page 1 -- TIME
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