Hugo's Little Red,..... I Mean Blue, Book

Where Hugo Chavez came from and apparently where he is planning to go...

CARACAS (Reuters) - How far will President Hugo Chavez press his effort to install Cuban-inspired socialism in oil-rich Venezuela? The answer may well have been written in his failed coup plans 15 years ago.

Chavez spent more than a decade conspiring with other leftist officers before leading the putsch in 1992, during which time he helped draft a set of decrees for a revolutionary government.

(SNIP)

The decrees themselves are attributed to Kleber Ramirez, a long-time guerrilla and leader of the Party of the Venezuelan Revolution, a division of the communist party that first drew Chavez into the circle of armed forces conspirators.

Chavez's own political manifesto, written several years before the coup, described a "concrete utopia" built on the ideas of Venezuelan liberation hero Simon Bolivar, the namesake of Chavez's leftist movement, which he calls the "Bolivarian Revolution."

The political treatise known as The Blue Book offers an outline of citizen-driven "participative democracy" that formed a key plank of his 1998 anti-poverty presidential platform.

It seems the "Blue Book" referred to is actually a miniature copy of the 1999 Venezuelan constitution, known by most in Venezuela as the Bolivarian Constitution. "Non-Official English translation" here.
Flashback to this classic take on Chavez from John Pilger...

Chávez is, of course, a threat, especially to the United States. Like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who based their revolution on the English co-operative moment (!!!!), and the moderate Allende in Chile, he offers the threat of an alternative way of developing a decent society: in other words, the threat of a good example in a continent where the majority of humanity has long suffered a Washington-designed peonage.