Hugo Chávez became the President of Venezuela (now renamed the "Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela") in 1999. He was reelected to the post in 2002 and again in 2006. The Venezuelan Constitution was recently amended to permit him to run for an additional term of six years, in 2012.

At an improvised Cabinet meeting held outdoors in a plaza on Caracas' east side, Chavez signed the amendment that will allow him to run for another six-year term in 2012.
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"I'm ready to continue commanding the revolution from 2009 at least until 2019, if the people want me to," the leftist president said, having promoted the amendment with the argument that only his permanence in power could guarantee the survival of the process of change that he has led since February 1999. (emphasis added)

A Constitutional amendment to permit him to run for additional terms had been defeated on 2 December 2007.  Prior to the vote on a second referendum to approve an additional term,  an editorial in the Washington Post noted:

In theory, advocates of democracy in Venezuela might welcome this referendum as a way to decisively stop Mr. Chávez's attempt to turn the country into a 21st-century Cuba. The problem is that elections in Venezuela are no longer free and fair. Mr. Chávez has turned national television into a state propaganda outlet, and the Miami Herald reported Sunday that the government spent tens of millions of dollars to buy votes in the recent state and local elections. The state election authority, which is controlled by Mr. Chávez's loyalists, delayed the announcement of his defeat in last year's referendum [also on Constitutional changes]; reliable sources say the president conceded only after he was told by military commanders that they would not put down protests against a falsified result. The official results, showing the margin of Mr. Chávez's loss, have not been released. (emphasis added)

El Presidente Chávez has worked ceaselessly and with exceptional vigor to bring tremendous changes to Venezuela; he may believe that his changes have been good for the country, and some other Venezuelans apparently, even now, accept that as well.

Some of the changes have involved land reform: taking land used in "socially wasteful" ways and putting it under the wise ownership and control of those (in some cases his own family members) whom he possibly believes will do better for the country than did the former owners. Recently, five large farms comprising a total of 10,305 hectares (roughly 25,000 acres) were taken, El Presidente Chávez observing that "There is no private land." The Venezuelan government has said that the seizures of large rural estates and poorly used land will continue, "in order to achieve a self-sufficient food supply." Nevertheless, such seizures in the past, involving more than 5.4 million acres of farmland, have produced few if any noticeably positive results for Venezuela.

The 32,000-acre(12,950-hectare) El Charcote Ranch in central Venezuela was meant as a showcase for President Hugo Chavez's agrarian revolution, turning a country with food shortages and runaway inflation into one that could feed itself. But since troops and peasants seized the land from a British agribusiness company four years ago, beef production has dropped from 2.6 million pounds (1.2 million kilograms) annually to zero. The ranch and many like it across the country raise the concern that the dream of a Venezuela living off its own land is just one more socialist promise heavy on rhetoric and light on results. The Chavez government says it has taken over more than 5.4 million acres (2.2 million hectares) of farmland from private owners. Yet food imports have tripled since 2004, the year before Chavez began his aggressive reform program.

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Article Author: Dan Miller

Dan was graduated from Yale University in 1963 and from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1966. He practiced law in Washington, D.C., retiring in 1996 to sail with his wife in the Caribbean. They settled in a rural area in Panama in 2001. …

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