Like leading lambs to the slaughter
writes Carlos Alberto Montaner on today’s Miami Herald (emphasis mine):

Lenin didn’t care a fig if all those enterprises mired and sank; what he wanted was a mob of obedient Soviets that would allow him to test Marx’s scatterbrained theories and, incidentally, to govern despotically like the implacable autocrat that he was.

Chávez, hand in hand with Fidel Castro, his beloved mentor, is walking exactly down the same road. Behind the dismantling of the system of private property is a search not for economic efficiency but for political control.

Where private property doesn’t exist, rebellion or plain civil disobedience is impossible. Where the state owns the means of production, society bows its head servilely, because the government controls its sustenance and because every enterprise becomes one more link in the repressive chain.

That explains why no communist dictatorship ever disappeared as the result of a massive popular rebellion. The citizen in the hands of the state is a defenseless being. Those of us who remember the process that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall know it only too well: communism collapsed when the East Germans began to run toward the border and Gorbachev refused to shoot.
. . .
The objective of eliminating private property in Venezuela is precisely that: to begin the ”stable-ization” of society, so it can be dominated without pity. Institutions will become stables. Venezuelans will be controlled in their neighborhoods by the Bolivarian Circles and will work in state enterprises under the watchful and implacable eye of the party’s labor leader.

Look at Life and death of the Cuban agrarian reform: The failure of socialist large estate, and you’ll see where things are heading. As Mora says,

This is what Hugo Chavez is doing to Cuba, right before our very eyes – it is the same bottomless evil that castro inflicted on Cuba

Mora is forgiven in saying “This is what Hugo Chavez is doing to Cuba” — Chávez is doing to Venezuela, but it’ll come down to the same thing: ruin.

Things are moving right along the Cubazuela road:
Here’s a list of missing persons and political prisoners in Venezuela.
Venezuela ranks second from the bottom in the Latin America Economic Freedom Index from the Heritage Foundation.
The International Monetary Fund expects Venezuela to have Latin America’s highest inflation this and next year.

Hugo’s plans go well beyond his borders. According to VCrisis, Venezuela’s harboring Al Qaeda’s Mustafa Nasar

Venezuelan army general Nestor Gonzalez Gonzalez and former director of Venezuela’s political police (DISIP) Johan Peña had made a series of allegations and accusations against Hugo Chavez regarding the harboring of wanted Al Qaeda terrorist Mustafa Nasar, Uranium development in Venezuela and support and state protection to Colombian narcoterrorists amongst other things. Johan Peña gives a chilling account (video in Spanish here) on the whereabouts of Nasar and how he enjoys the protection of Carlos Lanz, former terrorist-kidnapper cum boss of Venezuela’s aluminum conglomerate Alcasa.

General Gonzalez Gonzalez on the other hand shows, with the help of a Venezuelan map, various locations identified by the Venezuelan army where Colombian guerrillas from the Revolutionary Forces (FARC) rest, regroup and launch attacks to Colombia. He personally briefed Hugo Chavez in exquisite detail in February 2001 about the presence of FARC camps in border areas. Gonzalez Gonzalez argues that the FARC are but the armed component that shall force the revolutionary project that Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez want to implement upon the region.

While giving interviews to Newsweek while visiting the USA (and yammering about the “imminent” Operación Balboa), at home Hugo Chávez’s also cracking down not only on his domestic media, but also on international correspondents:

The Economist has its own correspondent in Venezuela who has also reported on Chavez’s drift towards a terrorist dictatorship, a reason perhaps why
Leupp may have confused his articles for reprints of mine (The Economist for
which I have worked in other regions of the world does not give bylines)
It is worth noting that the Economist’s correspondent has been the target of
a recent persecution by the Chavez regime (something which Leupp seems to
want to duplicate against me).The Venezuelan information ministry recently
demanded that he be replaced as dean of the foreign press corps by a Syrian
– interestingly enough.

Just last February The Economist was asking, Should the region be worried?

You decide.

(technorati tags Cubazuela, Hugo Chavez)

September posts on Venezuela:
Irán a Irán, version 2
Hugo’s idea of democracy: kiss your property rights good-bye
Hugo gets himself a gold mine . . . or two
More on the ficticious Operacion Balboa
So, Hugo, how was your weekend?
Operación Balboa, unmasked
Hugo on time-out after his speech at the UN.
Finally, something Hugo and I agree on
Iran and Venezuela