Left-winger Chavez, who infuriated the United States three years ago by embracing and meeting the former Iraqi dictator in Baghdad, is fiercely contesting an opposition bid to trigger a constitutional vote next year on his five-year rule.
Some Venezuelan opposition leaders and commentators said the dramatic capture of Saddam by U.S. forces on Saturday was a lesson for populist Chavez, who has denounced his opponents' pro-referendum petition as a "mega-fraud" he cannot accept.
"What will the fledgling dictator we have here think of all this? Will he understand this could be his fate if he keeps on trying to destroy democracy?" the anti-government Caracas daily El Nacional said in an editorial headed "Saddam and Co."
Chavez's opponents say he is brazenly trying to torpedo the referendum bid even before electoral authorities have decided if the poll will go ahead in the second quarter of 2004.
Critics of the former paratrooper, who has governed the world's No. 5 oil exporter since he won free elections in 1998, accuse him of ruling like an anti-democratic strongman.
They say he has also delighted in baiting Washington -- Venezuela's biggest oil client -- by criticizing U.S. policies and assiduously courting anti-U.S. leaders like Iraq's Saddam, Cuba's Fidel Castro and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi.
"These are Chavez's best mates ... the saying goes, tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are," Antonio Ledezma of the opposition Democratic Coordinator said.
Chavez, who survived a brief coup last year, condemns his opponents as rich right-wing "oligarchs" bent on trying to topple him and destroy his self-styled "revolution" he says is aimed at giving a better life to Venezuela's poor.
He also defends his foreign policy as an attempt to extend Venezuela's influence as an OPEC oil producer and to seek a "multi-polar" counterbalance to U.S. dominance in the world. ***
Interior Minister Lucas Rincón announced the inquiry Tuesday just hours after an arsonist's fire heavily damaged a church in Los Teques, a Caracas satellite town, for the second time in two weeks.
Although no one has been arrested in the attacks, Venezuela's leading archbishop has attacked the leftist Chávez and his supporters for turning his ''revolution'' into pseudo-religion, while a pro-government newspaper published a photo montage showing the prelate in a Nazi uniform.
Throughout Venezuela's history, ''Not even members of extremely radical religious groups had expressed so much hatred toward the religious sentiments of the Venezuelan people,'' another church leader, Msgr. Juan María Leonardi, bishop of the western diocese of Punto Fijo, said in a recent statement.
……………………….. Msgr. Baltazar Porras, archbishop of the western city of Mérida and the country's leading prelate, described the events as ''an attack on the deepest and noblest sentiments of all believers in the Catholic faith'' and blamed them on a tendency to ``turn political beliefs . . . into a kind of supreme deity.''
……………………………. Most Venezuelans are Catholic, and Chávez, who also claims to be Catholic, has frequently declared that ''God is with the revolution,'' meaning his policies on behalf of Venezuela's poor majority.
But he has engaged in fierce verbal clashes with church leaders since taking office in early 1999, even crossing swords with the papal nuncio, the Vatican's ambassador in Caracas. He has called the church a ''tumor'' and once declared that the bishops were in need of exorcism ``so that the devil inside comes out from under their vestments.''***