Once Russia's best-known economic reformer, he is tainted at home by the unpopularity of his privatisation programme, which many Russians saw as giving the well-connected a licence to loot.
He says he grew up in the West Bank where heonce considered using violence to vent his anger after a group of Israeli soldiers came to his family's home unannounced and interrogated him while his younger sister cried.
And heonce burned down the land registry in the town of Barinas, which happens to be in Mr Chavez's home state, to prevent the landowners taking legal action against squatters.