Chavez Moving to Step 2 of Becoming a Latin American Dictator

It may actually be step 3 or 4, since he's already started the privatization and wealth redistribution. Now he's got that censoring the press thing started.

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela's replacement of an opposition television station on Monday with a state network promoting President Hugo Chavez's socialist revolution drew sharp criticism that the former soldier is attacking democratic freedoms.

The leftist leader took the RCTV station off air around midnight on Sunday, silencing a major opponent to reforms that have given him greater control over the judiciary, the military and the oil sector of this OPEC nation.

It obviously is because they are immoral, not because they are a critic.

Chavez had accused RCTV of showing immoral soap operas and supporting a bungled 2002 coup, along with the nation's other main television stations that saturated the airwaves with often virulent anti-Chavez programming.

But the takeover of the channel dramatically boosts the state's presence in Venezuela's media, with the three main broadcast channels either controlled by the government or largely uncritical of its concentration of power.

Wonder if Sharpton and Jackson still think he's as wonderful a person as they have said he is in the past?