You loved Chavez I you'll love Chavez II

You loved Chavez I, you'll love Chavez II. The new mandate of Venezuelan President, re-elected December 3 with more than 62 of the vote officially starts today. And Hugo Chavez will clearly benefit without delay of the strengthening of its legitimacy for switch gear and lead the country towards "socialism of the 21st century" he advocates since 2005. Monday, while his Government loaned oath, he announced, before an audience of activists gathered in a theatre in the centre of Caracas, a series of measures that leave no doubt about his determination.

"We are heading toward socialism, and nothing or no one can prevent it." "We will continue our Bolivarian revolution", he began by announcing the renationalisation of the Telecom and electricity sectors. "It retrieve the property on the strategic means of production." "Everything which had been privatised shall be nationalized", he said (read also page 28).

Special powers

The electricity service is already public, with the exception of the distribution company of Caracas, which operates the firm Electricidad de Caracas, privacy has always been, but the US company AES took control in 2000. The national telecom company, CANTV, is detained since its privatization in 1991 by American Verizon Communications, which also planned to transfer its shares to the Mexican private monopoly Telmex.

To do this, Hugo Chavez will ask Parliament to vote a law granting special powers that is him delegating some legislative powers to vote a series of texts "revolutionaries", expected to strengthen further the presence of the State in all areas, economic, social and military. Parliament him being 100 acquired (since the boycott by the opposition of the legislative elections of 2005), the vote should be only a formality and should allow the President to implement these reforms "by a year". To symbolize the opening of this new era marked by the reform of the Constitution, the Bolivarian Republic will change its name and become the "Socialist Republic of the Venezuela".

It is under this new Act that Hugo Chavez intends to give the State control of huge reserve of extra-heavy crude oil in the Orinoco Belt, which operate in 4 strategic associations, international majors of oil, which heads Total. This process is already well under way since the law of 2001 on oil operations, which has forced the 20 companies in the country to convert their conventional petroleum activities in mixed companies controlled by the national company PDVSA last year. For extra-heavy crude oil, the current negotiations to announce even more difficult with the current radicalization of the regime.

The process is already committed

Another announcement: the end of the autonomy of the Central Bank, denounced as the result of a "neo-liberal theory" by Hugo Chavez. "PDVSA like depended on there (implication Washington), the Central Bank depended on there," he launched. In fact, the process of supervision of the financial institution is, also, already well under way. The power already extensively draws on the reserves of the institut d ' émission (35 to 37 billion of petrodollars in 2006) for the development fund Fonden and Fondespa (with respectively since 2005 17 and 2 billion dollars), which are used to finance its social programs and infrastructure. The objective of the President is therefore likely to make a factual situation, Constitution strongly challenged by the opposition.

If one adds the deletion, the last week of the licence for the broadcasting of opposition RCTV, this battery of measures, string described by many experts statist drift risk primarily to scare investors, feared Carlos Quenan, an economist at Natixis, "because it creates the idea that Chavez may at any time change the rules of the game."