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| Chávez: living on borrowed
time |
Hugo Chávez is very good at alienating people. The
Venezuelan president's revolutionary rhetoric and public friendship
with Fidel Castro have long since made him an enemy of the US State
Department; his authoritarian ways rub the domestic media up the
wrong way; his pronouncements have set the Catholic church against
him; his populism has enraged the middle classes; his refusal to
respect the old divisions of power has meant frequent clashes with
the unions; his unpredictability has resulted in increasingly
high-profile members of the military demanding his resignation. Now
his decision to devalue the bolivar seems set to lose him the
backing of the one sector of the population that still supported
him: the poor.
In truth, he had little choice. Capital flight had reached
unsustainable levels and the Treasury was...
