Chavez seeks equality in a socialist society

THE shopping mall is a blur of Guess jeans, Louis Vuitton purses and Motorola mobile phones, a temple of consumerism in a country that is supposed to be on a path toward socialism.

So popular is the Sambil Mall that 'Sambil society' has become a derogatory term in the Venezuelan socialist vocabulary. Reject it and build a fairer Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez urges his nation of 25 million people. But for many, it's a hard sell.

"We're capitalists, consumers by nature," said Marbelys Gonzalez, aged 26, as she strolled in the mall with two friends, carrying a shopping bag filled with five pairs of designer jeans. "We're crazy about shopping. If we go out and don't end up buying anything, we don't feel good."

Ms Gonzalez isn't a member of the Venezuelan elite often derided by Chavez, but rather a middle class university student whose money comes from her father, a jeweller, and her boyfriend, a soldier.

While most Venezuelans are too poor to afford luxuries, they live amid conspicuous consumption cosmetic surgery, SUVs, roads lined with billboards advertising Swiss watches and Scotch whisky.

Mr Chavez may regularly voice admiration for Fidel Castro's Cuba, but Caracas bears little resemblance to Havana. Ritzy social clubs, walled-in mansions and private schools are the norm for the wealthy, while the poor live in vast slums where unemployment runs high and gunfights are common. But even among the poor, the consumerist urge is evident in the Nike sneakers on many feet and the satellite TV antennas.

Mr Chavez says capitalism created Venezuela's poverty, and a "new socialism of the 21st century" can end it.

"It's the search for social justice, for equality," Mr Chavez said recently. "The capitalist model is perverse. It favours a minority and expropriates from the majority."

In his nearly seven years in power, Mr Chavez has presided over a society increasingly divided by his politics and sometimes shaken by spasms of street violence pitting his supporters against his enemies.

It remains unclear what sort of socialism Mr Chavez may achieve, but his latest moves provide hints raising taxes on foreign companies pumping oil, setting up stores to sell cheap food to the needy, subsidising farming and industrial cooperatives, and handing over some wealthy ranchers' lands to poor farmers.

"Every day it looks more like the communism of Castro," says Jesus Garrido Perez, an opposition congressman.

"The economic disaster has begun."

Not so, replies Mr Chavez.

"We aren't going to copy the Cuban model, or the Chinese model, or any model," he has said. "We're building our own model."

The ideology of that model is still being shaped.

In a packed auditorium, high-ranking diplomat William Izarra led a recent seminar on Mr Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution, named after Latin American independence hero Simon Bolivar.

"What do we mean by a new social order?" Mr Izarra asked the crowd. "A new political system, a new way of guiding the society, a new way of thinking and interpreting reality."