Hugo Chávez: Man With No Limits?

This story has been updated.

Gunmen have started dumping bodies down the hillside garbage chute in La Silsa. The slum, one of the poorest that ring Caracas, was crime-ridden when I was a teacher there in the 1980s. But residents like housewife Gladys Rodríguez tell me the barrio has become a killing field over the past few years, and that corpses are sometimes found atop the rubbish pile below her street. "That's what things have come to," says Rodríguez, 36. "How do you hide your kids from that?"

You can't, which is why Rodríguez says...