Chavez returns to power. (Insider Report).(President Hugo Chavez)(Brief Article)

After several tumultuous days, which saw Venezuela's Marxist President Hugo Chavez ousted from power by a low-key military coup, the revolutionary Marxist once again firmly controls the world's fourth-largest oil producer. Hugo Chavez, a former army paratrooper who himself led an unsuccessful coup attempt in 1992, managed to win the Venezuelan presidency in the 1998 election. But he quickly alienated large sectors of the Venezuelan population with his diatribes against Venezuela's wealthy (whom he has referred to as "squealing pigs"), his crackdowns on organized religion, and his rigid socialist economic policies.

Chavez has forged close ties with Cuba, Libya, Iraq, and Iran. He has been accused not only of involvement with the Communist insurgency known as FARC in neighboring Colombia, but also with Spain's Basque terrorist group ETA. More ominously still, Chavez has brought Cuban revolutionary advisors into Venezuela, according to reports from the Venezuelan press. Not only do these advisors form part of his most intimate circle of political confidants, but they have also been instrumental in organizing, arming, and indoctrinating Chavez' "Bolivarian circles," a network of revolutionary cells spread throughout the civilian and military sectors. According to Venezuelan journalists Patricia Poleo and Ibeyise Pacheco, in recent comments to the Miami-based Spanish-language newspaper Venezuela al Dia, Chavez' ...