"I'm ugly ... black mixed with Indian, that's me," he said, referring jokingly but proudly to his mixed-race ancestry which he shares with most of Venezuela's population.
"I'm a little uncouth sometimes. What can I do? I'm not going to change," Chavez added, speaking during his weekly "Hello President" television and radio show.
Chavez rose from obscurity to become a national figure in 1992 when he tried to seize power in a botched coup. Launching a political career after two years in jail, he won a landslide election in late 1998, promising a self-styled "revolution" to help his country's poor majority.
But his opponents, who have waged a determined campaign of protests and strikes against him, accuse Chavez of ruling like a dictator and of trying to install Cuba-style communism.
"I am not a communist ... if I was, I would say so," Chavez said. He added this distinguished him from Cuban President Fidel Castro, with whom he has forged a close alliance that has irked the United States, the main buyer of Venezuela's oil.
"Fidel Castro, my friend and brother, is a communist, but Venezuela's project is not communist," Chavez said. "At this moment in Venezuela, the program cannot be a communist one." [End]
In other words, rebuilding shattered world communism in Latin America.
A NewsMax.com investigation has revealed that Garcia, in his role as head of Sao Paulo Forum, controls and coordinates the activities of subversives and extremists from the Rio Grande to the southernmost tip of Argentina. This new axis of terrorism begins in Cuba, then works its way down to Colombia, financed with Venezuelan oil billions, and ends in Lula's Brazil.
In a policy dictated by Havana, Garcia has shown special interest in terrorist Manuel Marulanda Velez, a.k.a. "Tirofijo," leader of the terrorist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
Every year since 1990, Garcia has made it his priority to meet with FARC. The meetings have not just taken place in Havana (with Fidel Castro himself being always present), but also in Mexico, where Marco Aurelio Garcia traveled to meet with FARC member Marco Leo Calara on Dec. 5, 2000. What they talk about is a matter that remains behind closed doors. But every time they meet, FARC always increases its attacks in the weeks that follow, with a high cost in loss of human lives.***
And like Chavez, he said he was not a Communist for years. Only after he was secure in his power did he finally tell the truth.