Posted on 01/31/2002 9:42:38 PM PST by grimalkin
CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Waving a banner reading "Out With The Madman," Venezuela's largest opposition party asked the Supreme Court Thursday to have President Hugo Chavez dismissed as mentally unfit, calling the former paratrooper a lying, authoritarian megalomaniac.
As clowns and a Chavez impersonator wearing a straitjacket posed for cameras, the secretary-general of the Democratic Action party, Rafael Marin, presented the appeal, based on reports from two teams of psychiatrists.
"The study includes comparative analysis of the president's personality and other historical figures with similar conduct, such as Idi Amin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Fidel Castro," Marin told reporters outside the court.
Marin acknowledged that the psychologists who wrote the report did not interview Chavez for it.
"Unfortunately, it is very difficult to make the president put on a straitjacket and intern him in a clinic for analysis, although that would have been ideal," Marin said to laughter from dozens of supporters.
The report, which called Chavez "authoritarian," "megalomaniac," "extremely aggressive" and "a liar," said: "This analysis allows us to confirm abundant and serious signs of the president's mental incapacity to perform his duties."
Since taking office three years ago in the world's No. 4 oil exporter with a mandate to fight poverty and graft, the outspoken Chavez has become one of the region's most colorful leaders.
He has sung duets on live radio with his friend Cuban President Fidel Castro, unveiled plans to turn the presidential palace into a university for the poor, threatened to launch political opponents into space in a rocket and warned he would deport foreigners who insult him or his government.
Venezuela's 1999 constitution allows presidents to be removed for mental incapacity, and such actions are not without precedent in Latin America. In 1997, populist Ecuadorean President Abdala Bucaram -- who recorded a rock-and-roll record shortly after taking office -- was ousted for mental incompetence.
Marin's motion is unlikely to succeed, however, because it would require approval from Venezuela's government-controlled Supreme Court and the National Assembly, where populist Chavez holds the majority.
For Edmundo Chirinos, a psychologist who has acted as an advisor to Chavez since his imprisonment for leading a failed 1992 military coup, the appeal has no chance of success.
"There is no possibility that any court or group of experts will dismiss Hugo Chavez as mentally sick," Chirinos told Reuters from his leather consulting chair. "This is a political maneuver to try to discredit the president."
Chavez's aggressive rhetoric has split his oil-rich democracy along class lines with scathing tirades against "squalid oligarchs" and threats to defend his leftist revolution with tanks if necessary. His popularity has fallen from 80 percent to 40 percent.
Chavez has clashed with the powerful Catholic Church, the media, business chiefs, and union leaders. His frequent and lengthy state addresses on all television and radio channels -- sometimes exceeding five hours -- have also angered many inhabitants of a nation addicted to soap operas.
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