Jason Chue used to knock off at five o’clock sharp, leave the office and go and enjoy his evening. Now he routinely finds himself stuck there long into the evening answering the plaintive e-mails of hundreds of Venezuelans pleading for information on how they can emigrate to the United States.

“They’re professional people with good jobs,” Mr Chue, a consular officer at the US Embassy in Caracas, explains. “But they’ll say they want to leave because they are frightened for their future and their children.”

For the past eight years, rich Venezuelans have been trickling out of the country, spooked by the socialist bluster of their populist President, Hugo Chávez. But since being inaugurated for his third term in January, Mr Chávez’s talk has begun turning into substance, with an evermore radical series of moves to transform Venezuela into the world’s first “21st-century socialist state”. Now the super-rich are being joined by middle-class professionals and, increasingly, families.

At the US Embassy, citizenship claims and visa enquiries have doubled since January. A Canadian job fair, with a capacity of 500, was swamped by a crowd of 1,500. Every morning snaking queues form outside the embassies of Australia, Spain and Portugal to inquire about emigration there.

Maria Conquita Rodriguez, an agrochemical engineer, could cope with the nationalisation of electricity, telecommunications — even oil. Not active in the opposition, she felt little fear of being purged from a government job. But the President’s snowballing rhetoric since his vow of “socialism or death” has her spooked enough to join the queue at the Spanish Embassy to investigate her rights of residency there. “He is becoming more and more extreme and everything that he says becomes a law,” she said. “We are looking at a dictatorship. You realise you have to have your papers in order in case you have to leave.”

In Caracas, billboards and murals of Mr Chávez are everywhere, showing the smiling President clasping a child or surrounded by adoring crowds. Just as ubiquitous now are the huge red posters, each illustrating one of the five “engines of the revolution” unveiled by Mr Chávez in January.

The first of these, already in place, is the law handing Mr Chávez the power to rule by decree for the next 18 months, circumventing such unrevolutionary nuisances as Parliament. The second is the constitutional reform, which translates as the removal of presidential-term limits, allowing Mr Chávez to govern indefinitely. The remaining three, sceptics say, might as well just say “anything Mr Chávez fancies” because the first two enable him to do exactly that. “I can’t see anyone stopping him,” Mrs Rodriguez said. “We are becoming the next Cuba.”

Fine by Carmen Machado. She likes Cuba. She went there two years ago to have her cataracts removed at one of Mr Chávez’s famed missiones, in which 17,000 Cuban doctors work with Venezuela’s poor. “It’s a different country, it’s the way things should be,” she said wistfully at the soup kitchen in el Valle, one of Caracas’s sprawling slums. “If we can be like that, I’d be happy.”

Poor people are the main beneficiaries of Chávismo, as the doctrine is known, and at 80 per cent of the population, it is what they think that counts.

Mr Chávez’s strategy to win hearts and minds has been simple; with wealth and charisma, he buys their love. Venezuela’s Orinoco oil belt holds the world’s largest deposits of oil, and soaring oil prices have provided him with almost bottomless coffers of petrodollars to lavish on the poor.

“Nothing that’s happened here could have happened if Venezuela wasn’t an oil country — let’s be very clear on that,” Luis Lander, editor of the Venezuelan Review of Economic and Social Sciences, said. Some of the missiones have undoubtedly helped to improve lives; others may be more symbolic. The Robinson missioneboasted of having taught one million people to read; however, an independent survey later established that illiterate people were numbered only in the tens of thousands to begin with.

Ana Peña and her four children were left homeless when a rainstorm washed away their shack; now she lives in a renovated brick house given to her by the Government. Lina Noemon, the local municipal representative, pops round to see how she is doing. Who does she thank for her good fortune? “El Presidente,” she says, smiling. A quick chat and then Mrs Noemon produces a form to sign her up for the new single party being formed to bring together all the pro-Chávez forces. Mrs Pena takes the clipboard and signs carefully. What happens if someone refuses? “Very few do,” Mrs Noemon says.

Perhaps they fear the fate of the signatories of La Lista, the 2002 petition calling for a referendum on removing Mr Chávez. More than three million signed, forcing a ballot, but Mr Chávez succeeded in putting off the vote until he had strengthened support, then saw off the challenge with 56 per cent. La Lista was promptly posted on the internet and the signatories have been paying ever since.

“I want to work in the Supreme Court but it’s always the first question: did you sign the list?” said Andrea Teran, a law student. “You can’t get a government job if you signed, and the way nationalisation is going, soon all the jobs will be with the Government.”

She has a Canadian visa and will emigrate as soon as she graduates. Her father, an oil industry engineer, moved there three years ago after Mr Chávez purged the state oil company of 18,500 workers — half its employees — to break a strike that threatened the flow of funds.

Oil analysts say that production at the state oil company, PDSVA, has already been hampered by the haemorrhage of expertise and the squeeze on foreign oil companies may only make things worse.

Right now, it is the “third engine” of the revolution — morality and enlightenment — that is spooking the middle classes. They are terrified that a socialist curriculum is about to be imposed in schools. Rumours swirled about everything from the abolition of dual nationality to a law putting minors in state custody so they cannot be taken overseas.

“Some people don’t want to wait to find out if it will really happen,” Mr Chue said.

The statistics

1830 one of three countries formed after the collapse of Gran Colombia state

1959 Year democratic elections began

26 million population, largest city is the capital, Caracas

90 per cent. Proportion of export earnings from oil, over half federal budget and nearly a third of GDP

1999 Chávez came to power. Briefly deposed by a coup in 2002

38 percentage of Venezuelans below the poverty line

Sources: CIA World Factbook; Times archives

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