Posted on 11/01/2003 10:25:35 AM PST by Rams82
CARACAS - Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, a leftist firebrand who is facing demands at home for a recall referendum, appears to be doing his best to pick a fight with Washington.
He has hinted that the U.S. ambassador in Caracas is gay and branded Bush administration officials as ''imbeciles'' and ''criminals,'' while his minions accused the CIA of trying to destabilize the government.
Venezuelan political analysts differ as to whether Chávez is seeking to bolster his chances in the recall referendum by playing the nationalist card, or is looking for excuses to push his ''Bolivarian Revolution'' further to the left.
Bush administration officials have largely avoided responding to Chávez' jabs, saying they don't want to fall into any provocations by Chávez and turn an internal political problem into a U.S.-Venezuelan problem.
''We want to stop the microphone diplomacy,'' Roger Noriega, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, told The Herald on Wednesday.
Some Washington insiders speculate that there is an even greater desire to avoid antagonizing Chávez at the Pentagon, where the top priority is averting any diversions from Iraq, assuring the continued flow of Venezuelan oil to the United States -- the United States depends on Venezuela for more than 13 percent of its oil imports -- and maintaining good relations with the Venezuelan military.
AT ODDS
Chávez's leftist policies have long put him on a collision course with U.S. policies in the region. Whether it is the Free Trade Area of the Americas, U.S. military aid to neighboring Colombia or relations with Cuba, his government is at odds with the U.S. position.
Recently, however, he has stepped up his attacks on Washington with the approach of Nov. 28-Dec. 1, when his opposition will be collecting signatures seeking a recall referendum on his populist rule.
He noted that U.S. Ambassador Charles Shapiro had kissed a male guest at a recent embassy function and said, ''How strange,'' in what virtually all Venezuelans perceived as calling him a homosexual.
He has repeatedly accused the CIA of seeking to destabilize his government -- but offered no evidence -- and warned Washington to stop meddling in Venezuelan affairs.
A VIDEO
Just last week, pro-Chávez lawmakers made public a video they said showed U.S. secret agents training dissident military officers and municipal police in ''terrorist'' tactics. The U.S. Embassy said it showed agents of the Miami-based Wackenhut security company in a training session and denied any CIA wrongdoing.
''Mr. Bush,'' Chávez said in an Oct. 5 speech, ``deal with the problems of the United States, which are plenty, because Venezuela's problems belong to Venezuela.''
In the same speech, he referred to objections by Washington and others to his government's confiscation of microwave transmission equipment from the opposition TV news channel Globovisión.
''They behave like imbeciles,'' he said, ''because without knowing what's really going on, they start issuing communiqués and saying the Chávez government is violating I don't know what.'' He went on to say that those critics were ``criminals, because they're protecting criminals -- and he who protects a criminal ends up being a criminal.''
CHILE COMPARISON
Two weeks earlier he claimed that business owners who took part in a two-month-long strike against his government early this year were paid by the CIA.
''It's the same thing that happened in Chile under Salvador Allende,'' he said.
The CIA assertion has since been repeated by pro-Chávez legislators and even Vice President José Vicente Rangel, all of whom allege that a series of recent bomb attacks inside military installations was carried out by the CIA. They offered no evidence.
''What [Chávez] is looking for,'' argues Felipe Mujica, president of the opposition Movement to Socialism, ``is for [U.S. officials] to attack him, so that he is left on his own and can do whatever he likes.''
Chávez even appears to be preparing for a Cuba-styled U.S. embargo and in recent months has repeatedly stressed the need for ``food sovereignty.''
FOOD DISTRIBUTION
When the anti-government strike threatened food distribution, he set up an embryonic government-run food import system, using Cuba as the intermediary.
''If his regime could survive that way,'' said Elsa Cardozo, a university professor of international relations, ``he wouldn't care. He's shown no concern for the fact that the private sector is on the verge of collapse.''
Under all the leftist theories of foreign policy that Chávez has studied and now holds, political analyst and Chávez biographer Alberto Garrido said, ``the final confrontation was always with the United States.''
But Garrido believes Chávez may feel he's not yet ready for a showdown, so he is nibbling around the edges of misbehavior in order to lay the groundwork for an eventual break.
''He's playing on the U.S. weakness, which is oil,'' he said.
Herald staff writer Andres Oppenheimer reported from Miami and special correspondent Phil Gunson from Caracas.
Crushing Venezuela would just be an exercise for an MP battalion, and not much of an exercise at that.
Chavez is a big mouthed thug. He thinks if he's seen as a threat to the U.S. he'll be viewed as the big man in Latin America. He's a dirty little weasel and he needs to be dealt with like any vermin would be. It's time for the good people of Venezuela to start getting all opposition factions together and run this guy out on a rail.
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