Alejandro Velasco

200-year anniversary of Bolivar.

Right.

And the idea is, you know, on his 200th anniversary, the vision that Bolivar had for not just Venezuela, but Latin America more broadly will come to fruition, and we will be the people who marshal that into reality.

Chávez was a gifted communicator, although now we know, not now, we've known for a while, that he also took classes in communications.

And that was coupled with, as I mentioned before, this really dramatic moment after his failed coup where he goes on television and delivers this message.

And so he knew from an early moment that television specifically was an extremely important communicational vehicle and medium.

And so one thing that he does early in his presidency is he starts this talk show.

So every Sunday, it's called Aló, Presidente, to reflect that you could just call up the president, like, Aló, Aló, Aló, Presidente, right?

And would the phone lines were open?

Initially.

Yes.

Not later, but initially the phone rings were open.

And this is really, really central to understanding or even trying to understand Chavez, Chavismo, where we are right now in Venezuela.

It is not only not accurate, but it is willfully false to suggest that Chavismo was a cohesive political project from the start.

the primary hallmark of Chavismo is adaptation over time.

And so Chavez, at the moment when he's elected, has a particular project in mind, but it is neither socialist nor anti-American, quite the opposite.

His primary vision for Venezuela at the moment was, we are going to

expand participatory democracy.

So we're going to try to create mechanisms for people who have felt left out of the political system to have more direct engagement with the political system.

And we're going to rebuild state capacity by rebuilding our oil industry, which in the 1990s had undergone a process of reprivatization, even though it had been nationalized in the 1970s under that period of, you know, oil boom.