Among the celebrities are anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, the prominent writer Cornel West, Bolivia’s new president, Evo Morales, and Harry Belafonte. Chavez, of course, had not only been saying the same thing of Bush but also that the US president was out to get him.

Belafonte had led an American delegation that included Danny Glover, West, Dolores Huerta, the farm workers advocate. Another visitor, Eva Golinger, accused Washington of aiding Chavez’s "destabilizers," something that the Bush administration denied. Reva Batterman, 27, a graduate student, said she wanted to show Venezuelans that "we’re not all Bush supporters or imperialists."

Neo-liberalism or globalization has been Chavez’s target; there’s also a discernible leftward movement in South American politics. That the Iraq war is unpopular also helps. But what has really earned accolades from "Sandalistas" is the huge oil-financed social spending. Just as Thaksin has doubled the income of Thailand’s the rural masses, Chavez is shifting the country’s oil wealth to the poor. (Global Exchange, based in San Francisco takes visitors who pay ,300 on a two-week tour poor barrios where Chavez has the strongest support.)

As Katherine Boudin, a member of the 1970s Weathermen, put it, "The fact that we have a country that’s trying to create an alternative model is bold and ambitious and unique, and that’s why people are wondering, ‘Is this possible?’"

Naturally, the answer is that "it depends." Opposition politician Julio Borges says that while it’s true that Chavez had showered aid on the poor, he is a strong man out to crush dissent. He also says that it’s the armed forces who carry out the (social) transformation, that Venezuelan democracy is a "militarized one," and that an inept and abusive government attacks the press — a charge that the Chavez administration denies.