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Venezuela's Expat RevolutionariesMeet the young foreigners who love Hugo Chávez so much they moved to his "Bolivarian paradise."

By Alexander CuadrosPosted Tuesday, March 31, 2009, at 7:49 AM ET

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On referendum day, I met a 6-foot-4 platinum-headed German named Tilo Schmidt as we waited for Chávez to show up to vote at a high school in a poor neighborhood. Schmidt, 33, was filming a pro-Chávez documentary and staying at Casa Azul, a sprawling apartment in downtown Caracas that is a kind of cross between a hostel and a commune. I visited him there a couple of days later. The rooms are small and simple. There are Che Guevara posters on the walls and laundry hanging in the open-air patio. American intervention in Latin America is the usual dinner conversation. Another Casa Azul tenant was the "German" yodeler of the referendum ad (she turned out to be Austrian). It's a sketchy area, Schmidt told me: "I get this kind of paranoid feeling on the streets—I don't go out at night." Still, he felt swept up in what he saw going on around him.

Jojo Farrell, who now lives in New York but used to coordinate Venezuelan "reality tours" through a nonprofit called Global Exchange, had seen a lot of "starry-eyed" types come through the house. "It's exciting to be marching in the streets, the aura of change," he said. "Elections are like a party here." But he acknowledged that these expat chavistas would never have as much at stake as the Venezuelans involved in the process, because if things turned sour, they could always leave. "You've always got the ticket out," he said; Schmidt, for one, was staying just another week.

After leaving Caracas, I managed to get hold of Eva Golinger, a thirtysomething American lawyer who is, in her own words, "an emblematic figure of the process." I interviewed her shortly after she returned from a literary festival in Cuba. In 2005, she published a book called The Chávez Code, which digested thousands of official documents related to U.S. meddling in Venezuelan affairs. She's on television all the time these days, sometimes even appearing with Chávez, who once called her "the bride of Venezuela." She was able to get citizenship because her mother is Venezuelan, but she doesn't fully identify herself with either nationality: "Every revolution has its internationalists, people who've come from abroad and become intimately involved with the struggle," she said. "It's fundamental."

Because of her outspoken criticisms of the Venezuelan opposition and the U.S. government, Golinger has received death threats. Her apartment has been broken into and trashed. She acknowledges that Caracas is not an easy city to live in—unlike "people-friendly" New York, her home base until 2005. But perhaps her biggest sacrifice came when her involvement in the revolution began to cause friction with her Venezuelan husband and his family. They eventually divorced. "He gave me an ultimatum," she said: "Him and life in New York or the revolution. I chose the revolution. It's my life, it's my principles and values and ideals, my dreams.

"It's too bad. He felt threatened by it. I'm not sorry—it's sad, but those things happen. They make you stronger. They reinforce your choice, because it's the path that's right for you."