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Photos BY TYLER BRIDGES McClatchy News Service CARACAS -- They don't call him President Bush in Venezuela anymore. We think the Bush administration should follow the same policies that they and the International Monetary Fund have always told us to follow when we have economic problems -- a structural adjustment that requires cutting government spending and reducing the role of government. No one in Latin America has been making more hay of Bush's turnabout than Venezuela's President Hugo Chvez, a self-proclaimed socialist who is the US government's biggest headache in the region. Mark Weisbrodt, director of the leftist Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, advises numerous Latin American governments. He called the recent Bush administration policies ironic. People are saying that Bush is privatizing risk and socializing losses,'' Weisbrodt said. John Ross, who has begun providing advice to the Chvez government, along with his boss, former London Mayor ''Red'' Ken Livingstone, criticized the US president and his conservative political allies. And they've adopted the measures that they've condemned other governments for taking. But it is the end of Reaganism and Thatcherism,'' he added. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a conservative, was a close ally of President Reagan in the 1980s. In Peru, Congresswoman Nancy Obregon said she thought Bush's actions were sounding the death knell for capitalism. But Bolivia's ambassador in Venezuela, Jorge Alvarado, took issue with Obregon's comparison. But Sutherland said he wasn't about to let Bush join his group.
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