>I was asking a knowledgeable friend about how to account for the
>Venezuelan army's swing to the left, when the military of so many
>other Latin American countries swung in the other direction, and he
>guessed that it had something to do with the fact that the officer
>corps in Venezuela is not drawn from the elites but from the
>aspiring lower classes of the countryside and the cities.
Richard Gott has some good stuff on this in his book on Chavez. He points out that the militaries in LatAm do have strong left, as well as right, traditions. In a stunning phrase, Gott describes a Venezuelan officer as being Harvard-trained and of Trotskyist leanings.
Doug