Lands have been confiscated, foreign companies driven out and utilities renationalised, but even so there is a special place in Venezuela for Louis Vuitton. The immaculate store in the Sambil shopping-mall now ranks as the firm's most successful in the whole of Latin America, shifting several hundred thousand-dollar carpetbags week in week out. "We have a mix", explains the extremely reticent shop manager, flown in days before from Paris. "We have older clients, and we have newer ones."

Not far to the east the free flow of wealth has also engulfed Petare, the giant settlement of breeze-block houses, sticking like a biblical citadel to the hills of Caracas valley. Here there are new blue water-cisterns on every house, concrete supports to halt mudflows, Cuban ophthalmologists, education and literacy programmes. There are subsidised food stores, committees fighting for residents' property rights, community sports facilities. But it is best not to leave home after 7 pm: Petare is also home to a plague of drive-by shootings and erratic teenage gunfire.

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