Reply #6: Not much evidence... [View All]

[punpirate]

... the biggest problem is that he's pissed off the wealthy in the country. He's making alliances with other South American and Caribbean countries, along with Iran and China, which he hopes will create virtual and actual independence from the US, and that upsets a lot of people in the US government.

His Bolivarian revolution is centered around using the commonwealth of the country to raise the standard of living of the peasants, and that gives him tremendous political clout, but it doesn't buy him too many friends amongst the "free trade" crowd.

He's been elected twice and survived a recent recall election. That ought to be enough to quiet the bunch referring to him as a "dictator," but, it's not, and won't. He's not a puppet of the US, so he'll continued to be referred to as such.

The irony, of course, is that the US has vocally and vociferously defended dictatorships throughout Latin America, as long as they bought weapons from us and were sufficiently right-wing in character.

But, no, he's not a dictator, by the commonly understood meaning of the word.