Camino de los Indios, Venezuela ? Like most ambitious state projects in oil-rich Venezuela, the new city being built in the thickly wooded mountains here began as a whim of President Hugo Chavez’s.

Flying in his helicopter north of Caracas over forests filled with monkeys and tropical birds, the president suddenly had a eureka moment – he would carve a self-sustaining, self-contained city from the wilderness. Chavez envisioned this as the first of several utopian cities, a bold plan reflecting both Venezuela’s capacity for undertaking ambitious projects and the president’s growing propensity for making all major decisions.

“He told me, ‘I want to see if it’s possible,'” recalled Ramon Carrizales, minister of housing. “So we began to explore it, and we found vast tracts that could be utilized.”

Carrizales, a retired army colonel like the president, added, “I think that with the president’s intuition – the president is a man of great intuition – he perceived that you could develop something there, so we started in November of 2006.”

Chavez’s plans

Venezuelans are bracing for more grandiose plans, especially if Chavez’s powers expand under proposed constitutional changes that voters are being asked to approve on Sunday.

The president’s allies control Congress, the Central Bank and every other major institution. And with the price of oil approaching $100 a barrel, Chavez has the economic muscle along with the political might to carry out his biggest dreams.

“Everyone here knows that no one advises Chavez,” said Luis Miquilena, a former interior minister and mentor to Chavez who has since broken with him. “Chavez is the one who decides everything.”

Now finishing his ninth year in office, Chavez has hatched ideas ranging from moving clocks back half an hour to building artificial islands in the Caribbean. To the Bush administration’s consternation, he is also forging political ties with Iran, an alliance that economists say has few practical economic considerations.

Chavez also is accelerating state spending on myriad social programs while proposing measures that critics say are designed to solidify his support among the large masses of poor who form his base. Maintaining such support is essential as Chavez campaigns for a “yes” vote on constitutional changes that would permit indefinite reelection, allow him to appoint allies to head newly created federal territories and increase the president’s influence over the government’s vast oil-generated wealth.

‘Socialist cities’

“What he wants to do is build a small model of what a future Venezuela could possibly look like,” said Demetrio Boersner, a former diplomat and left-leaning historian who is critical of Chavez. “He wants undoubtedly to strengthen his influence on the poor people living in the poor quarters of town. He wants to reinforce the belief that many low-income Venezuelans have that he’s on their side, that he’s on the side of the underdog, on the side of the poor.”

The plans for what officials call the “socialist cities” envisioned by Chavez are grand, evoking new cities built in such divergent countries as Brazil and the old Soviet Union. Chavez is relying on Cuban engineering companies and technical advice from Belarus, a former Soviet republic that Carrizales, the housing minister, said has “much experience in agro-industrial cities.”

Carrizales said that the city here in the mountainous area of Camino de los Indios, to be called Caribia – another suggestion by the president – will be the first of several small cities and urbanization projects across the country.

In Caribia, the idea is to build scores of four-story apartment blocks that will eventually house 100,000 people. There also will be parks and sports complexes, Carrizales said, as well as schools, hospitals, state-run factories and small fields for crops.

Government officials and engineers say the plan, at its root, is designed to help people. “This is a social housing project, for people with little money, so it’s very accessible for those types of families,” explained Alfredo Tirado, an engineer overseeing part of the project.

Reservations

Not everyone, though, is enthused. Worrisome – particularly to urban planners and government opponents – is that the construction is proceeding without much outside input. Architects, engineers and urban planners in Caracas say the government is rushing headstrong into expensive, ill-considered utopian projects.

“The majority of socialist cities that were built in socialist countries failed,” said Maria Josefina Weitz, an urban planner in Caracas. “When you create something by ideological decree, it doesn’t respond to the real needs of people. Cities have their own origin, develop on their own and have their own dynamic.”