Well, like you said, Chavez is the most radical of the bunch, even though his policies are no more leftward than say Sweden. Lula and especially Nestor Kirchner are much more moderate, hell Argentina is even promising to pay most of it's credtors back after it was driven into bankruptcy.
But I still maintain that the approach taken by any of those countries, across the spectrum, is superior to the neolib program, which has AFAIK not yielded a single success anywhere in the world. But even within these policies, there are specific issues of pacing and sequencing and the like, which have been wrong so consistantly that the only conclusions are that either the whole IMF/World Bank outfit is hopelessly incomptetent, or that the policies were deliberately enacted, knowing full well what their consequences would be.
When you say that the way that Chavez has implemented the policies scares off investors, my first reaction is "so ****ing what". Like I said, I wouldn't make a good politician, but the notion that the development of a country, any country, is at the mercy of an all-mighty foreign elite called investors, a sacred cow who's needs come before that of the population, frankly this repulses me. Every country has to toe the line and above all else, be nice to the investors, lest they pull their money out, which they usuallly do anyway. But almost every industrialized country today, though there are exceptions, has grown prosperous by implementing strictly protectionist policies, and now has quite successfully managed to kick down the ladder.
Venezuela is rich in oil, Brazil and others have a large, industrialized economy; there is no reason why any of these countries should be at the beck and call of foreign investors, any more so than Spain or France. That's probably oversimplifying it a bit, but well, that's inevitable.
