BY TYLER BRIDGES
They line up early, before sunrise, beside a massive metal fence to wait for a government grocery store named for a 1960s Venezuelan revolutionary to open.
These poor Venezuelans come for food, made cheap by subsidies from their nation's immense oil wealth. If residents of the Venezuelan capital's impoverished Catia neighborhood wonder whom to thank, murals of President Hugo Chávez watch over them as they wait.
''The government pays for the subsidies, and that's why we elected the president, and that's why we love him,'' said Medarda Romero, 66, setting down a black garbage bag full of food. ``He cares about the poor. Previous presidents didn't.''
Venezuela's government gets 50 percent of its income from oil revenues, however, and now falling oil prices threaten to force Chávez to scale back the food subsidies and other government programs he's used to lift millions of Venezuelans out of poverty.
Not only could that make life harder for the poor but it also could threaten Chávez's political power, because his popularity depends at least in part on his free-spending anti-poverty programs.
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