Time Flies, Chavez Doesn't

I remember, years ago now, sitting next to a Venezualan woman while flying back from L.A. to Atlanta. We started talking and, because we were both doing non-profit work with HIV/AIDS at the time, we talked for the full 4+ hour flight. I distinctly remember her telling me about a man named Hugo Chavez and how neither she, her husband nor any of their friends could quite wrap their minds around his ascendancy in their country's politics.

And now, I can barely wrap my mind around this:

Hugo Chavez has just about everything a president could want:
popular support, a marginalized opposition, congress firmly on his side and a booming economy as he starts his new six-year term. Now, he's about to become even more powerful - the all-Chavista National Assembly is poised to approve a "mother law" as early as Wednesday enabling him to remake society by presidential decree. In its latest
draft, the law would allow Chavez to dictate measures for 18 months in 11 broad areas, from the "economic and social sphere" to the "transformation of state institutions." Chavez calls it a new era of "maximum revolution," setting the tone for months of upheaval as he plans to nationalize companies, impose new taxes on the rich
and reorient schools to teach socialist values.

Mother law. Maximum revolution.
Does poverty, especially the abject kind, create credulity through agamogenesis?