ecently, I had a chance meeting with Francisco Torrealba Ojeda. You probably don’t recognize the name but if you own stock in a private company in Venezuela, the very mention of his name should send chills down your back.

Francisco is a member of Hugo Chavez’s National Assembly in Venezuela and is president of the National Assembly’s Labor Affairs Committee. This committee serves as “President” Hugo Chavez’s rubber stamp in the legislature to legitimize the confiscation of private property by the Venezuelan dictator under the auspices of worker’s rights.

Torrealba was giving an interview to TeleSur (a government owned and operated news agency) so I snapped his picture and asked his assistant if I could also talk to him. She nervously looked around and told me that “unregistered” media cannot have impromptu interviews with the Congressman.

I repeated my question to Torrealba directly when he finished the television interview. He reacted in a friendly manner and handed me his business card. He also asked me “where is Sacramento” indicating my self-introduction as a Sacramento Union columnist (interested in an interview) wasn’t going to help. I told him, “[the city] is the capital of the State of California.” He looked at me suspiciously and said, “Oh, I thought that was Los Angeles.”

After some small talk, he told me to give him a call later in the week and we could sit down together for a more formal interview. He was apparently rushing to his next meeting down the street. Needless to say, he never returned my calls or email.

What makes the chance encounter so interesting is the location. He wasn’t leaving his offices in Caracas, Venezuela. He wasn’t attending meetings at his government’s embassy in Washington, D.C. and he wasn’t in the United Nations where his beloved leader Hugo Chavez called President Bush “the devil.”

Our brief encounter took place in Denver, Colo. a few blocks from the Democratic National Convention. Yes, he was attending the Democrat’s national convention I learned later as an “observer.” When I caught him, he was just leaving an event where President Clinton and other senior Democrats participated. The forum was sponsored by a “non-partisan” taxpayer-subsidized group called the National Democratic Institute headed by Clinton’s former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright.

Torrealba is an important figure in Venezuelan politics and is regularly in the news. Last April, he actually out Chavez-ed Hugo Chavez. His committee in the National Assembly initiated the vote in the legislature to confiscate Venezuela’s largest steel manufacturer, Sidor. The National Assembly vote declaring the company a “public utility” is the legal cover Chavez needed constitutionally before officially expropriating the company. Torrealba responded to questions from the media regarding stockholder complaints as unimportant. He callously dismissed any complaints by saying people just need to “accept it” since Venezuela is a sovereign country. Chavez’s popularity in Venezuela has been sinking like a lead ball recently as economic chaos worsens and the annual inflation rate, now 30 percent, is the highest in South America.

Chavez later called for more “consensus” regarding the amount of compensation to domestic shareholders—apparently out of concern for his worsening reputation. He even agreed to negotiate compensation for Ternium S.A., the Luxembourg-based company that owns 60 percent of the company’s stock.

Chavez, while trying to mask his leftist government’s predatory actions, described the coerced deal as “win-win” claiming, “That’s our motto.”

Later that week I watched on television as Sen. Barack Obama verbally attacked President Bush while describing his own left-of-center agenda in soft rhetorical win-win slogans. I couldn’t help but wonder if Francisco Torrealba Ojeda wasn’t among those 80,000 people—clapping and cheering in the stadium.