Word: vez
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...double take: these undergraduates were pouring out of campuses to oppose the new standard bearer of the Latin left. And they weren't all children of right-wing oligarchs. Many were leftists themselves, with first names like Stalin. Their beef, they said, wasn't so much with Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution, which many of them acknowledged had finally enfranchised the poor in a country that has the hemisphere's largest oil reserves but one of its most shamefully inegalitarian societies. Rather, they were part of the first Latin American generation raised on a democratic political diet, and they...
...image of political independence, but they've since allowed themselves to be viewed as allies of the opposition - which, despite recent triumphs in state and local elections, is still seen by many if not most Venezuelans as residue from the ultra-corrupt élite that Chávez overthrew a decade ago. The movement's leaders, who once endeared themselves to the Venezuelan hoi polloi with their college-kid austerity and presence in poor barrios, now move about with top-of-the-line BlackBerrys. And more politically conservative estudiantes like Yon Goicochea, who was one of the most visible faces...
...vez seems confounded no more. He has called yet another national referendum, for Feb. 15, to revisit the term-limits question. And this time he's doing a more effective if controversial job of thwarting the youths who once thwarted him. "If they block a street, tear-gas them good," he has urged the police. With the students neutralized, and with the regular opposition parties still unable to challenge Chávez on a national level, the leftist revolutionary looks likely to win this new bid for indefinite re-election. Chávez "is playing a more effective role against...
...till now, the only people who have figured out how to beat Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez have been kids. Since first winning the presidency in 1998, Chávez had never lost an election until December 2007, when he was stunned in a constitutional referendum that he had hoped would eliminate presidential term limits and greatly expand his socialist project. But his nemesis in that plebiscite wasn't Venezuela's feckless political opposition. It was a broad and unexpected university-student movement that took to the streets, mobilized the victorious "no" vote and flummoxed Chávez...
That's made it easier for Chávez to use a heavier hand with the students - as have recent videos that appear to show some students allegedly transporting and preparing Molotov cocktails, in one instance igniting a small forest fire in a national park. (The students insist the fire was started by a police tear-gas canister, and that police had planted homemade bombs in one of their trucks.) "They want to provoke us onto the road of violence," Chávez told a crowd of supporters in western Venezuela this week, suggesting the students are "desperate" to have...