Chavez' new plane, which cost sixty-five million dollars, is a gleaming white Airbus A-319

A few years ago, when Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela, said that he wanted a new jet to replace the nearly thirty-year-old Boeing bequeathed to him by his predecessor, his critics raised an outcry. But Chávez went ahead with his plans. His new plane, which cost sixty-five million dollars, is a gleaming white Airbus A-319, with a white leather interior, seating for sixty passengers, and a private compartment. The folding seat-back trays have gold-colored hinges, and there is plenty of legroom. Chávez has spent more than a year altogether on trips abroad since taking office, in February, 1999, and so the jet is a kind of second home. His seat bears an embossed leather Presidential seal. Paintings of nineteenth-century Latin-American independence heroes hang on the walls, including a prominent one of Simón Bolívar, known as El Libertador. Bolívar led military campaigns to free large parts of South America from Spanish rule, and in 1819 he helped create a vast nation called Gran Colombia, which encompassed the present-day republics of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama. But political rivalries and internecine warfare frustrated Bolívar’s dream of a United States of South America, and Gran Colombia fell apart soon after his death, in 1830.