When Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez first came to power, he liked to claim that he wasn't a Marxist. He preferred to refer to his takeover as a "Bolivarian revolution." However, over the course of his reign, his tune changed and his real intention quickly became clear. Almost immediately, he announced that “We’re moving toward a socialist republic of Venezuela” and started telling anyone who'd listen that, if Bolivar were alive today, he'd be a committed socialist. Eventually, he was happy to call himself a communist, and in the later days of his reign he was openly singing the praises of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
