Chavez delivers $2.3 billion to poor ahead of vote

President Hugo Chavez on Friday unveiled a massive subsidy for poor families that will cost Venezuela $2.3 billion just in 2012, when he will seek reelection for a third six-year term. The social assistance funds include allotments of $100 a month for every pregnant woman, and payments to poor families of $100 a month per minor child, for up to three children. People who are caring for handicapped children will get the equivalent of $140 a month regardless of the child's age, Chavez said. The subsidy is significant in terms of average income in Venezuela, where $100 is about one-third of a minimum-wage worker's monthly salary. "I started looking at statistics again, at all the numbers," the president said, promising a "great mission" to fight extreme poverty "which at times is close to misery." "Do you think a mission like this would happen in a capitalist society? It would not be possible," argued Chavez, a leftist ex-paratrooper who has been in power in this country of 28 million people since 1999. The president also threatened to nationalize and take over any businesses that do not obey his government's new law for regulating goods and services, especially retailers he claimed were "hoarding" basic foods to drive up prices. "The bourgeois, the middlemen ... the hoarders had best cooperate or we are going to enforce the law," Chavez said. "I will be leading the people who do it, and we are going to come in and occupy these businesses' plants, and we will nationalize whatever we have to, but they are not going to get away with it." A staunch critic of the United States, Chavez is the key political and economic ally of Cuba, the Americas' only one-party communist regime. He also has launched economic support programs for sympathetic governments across Latin America.