Hugo Chavez as the next Simón Bolívar?

[franklie 0]

I was messaging with a buddy of mine who lives in Maracaibo, Venezuela. According to the talk around the city there, the problems between Colombia and Venezuela in part due to Chavez's support of FARC, the Colombian terrorist(?) group, along with Presidente Chavez's support of some of the other S. American countries like Bolivia, Perú and Ecuador is because Hugo is trying to recreate Simón Bolívar's Gran Colombia with him as the leader.

I'm not sure if he is pulling my leg so I was wondering if anyone else has heard any talk of Hugo Chavez trying to re-create the Gran Colombia?

[lucyrich 20]

Your friend wasn't just pulling your leg, and your friend isn't the first one to point this out.

Google certainly has a bunch of links about this.

Chavez is always talking about Simon Bolivar on his "alo presidente" show. He's added the word "Bolivariana" to every Venezuelan thing he can, sometimes at great expense. He's proposed exhuming Bolivar's remains, because he wants to prove Bolivar was assasinated (by agents of George Bush's CIA?).

The guy's clearly a nutcase, and he's clearly obsessed with Bolivar. It's not much of a stretch to guess that he might like to form himself in Bolivar's image and finish the job Bolivar tried to start. Whether he has very concrete plans, and whether he's got the ability to execute on those plans, is another thing.

[HAL 9000 96]

Gran Colombia fell apart due to many obvious problems in administering a diverse territory, barring the fact that most latinos share way too much in common for the variations to be a cause for concern. The historical facts of other powerful nations taking potshots at the birth of such a nation is no suprise and lays the groundwork for part of the current political and socioeconomic atmosphere in force in South America.

As for Chavez the nutcase to equal himself to Bolivar... well, that's his perogative as a maniac... Bolivar was born in Venezuela, or at least the area that became it, and he helped lead a successful campaign to liberate the continent from colonial rule. Maybe Chavez sees himself as a Bolivar of sorts in that respect, and he may not be that wrong to see himself in that light. But he desperately needs to change his tactics of public support of the categorization of FARC as an army. Reason being that although this may be a matter of classification, being an army or not does not free them of using terror tactics against their own population. Hence the total stupidity of getting involved in a matter completely out of his domain.

He should just stick to being the Bolivarian revolutionary in getting his own citizens out of poverty, thereby creating a real middle class in Venezuela and guaranteeing his 'revolution' a future against those upper classes that so despise him for taking away future profitability.