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Chávez's Bolivarian Circles in South Florida - 17 around U.S. - Spreading around world *** Circle leaders draw strength from what they say is a growing Bolivarian international network. The U.S. circle members will hold their first national assembly in New York in March, and Chávez representatives from Venezuela plan to attend.

The Venezuelan government also will host an international Bolivarian Circle meeting in April in Caracas. ''There are circles in Bilbao, Madrid, Denmark -- all over the place. It's really neat,'' said Guillermo García Ponce, Chávez advisory committee coordinator, in an interview with The Herald in Caracas. He acknowledged that South Florida has become an anti-Chávez stronghold. ''I suppose [the Miami circle] will have to keep a low profile,'' García said.

Anti-Chávez activists say they do not oppose the presence of a Bolivarian Circle in Miami as long as it doesn't instigate the violence they allege the circles have caused in Venezuela -- a claim Soto and others deny. ''The government has allowed the Bolivarian Circles to attack the newspapers, attack the reporters,'' said Raúl Leoni, a Venezuelan opposition leader who lives in Weston. ``The fact that you win an election doesn't make you eternal if you're not doing your job correctly.''

……………..The Bolivarian Circles -- along with Chávez's controversial 1999 ''Bolivarian constitution'' -- are part of his overarching ``Bolivarian Revolution.'' Some 70,000 circles exist in Venezuela, made up largely of the working class. Typically, they meet weekly and engage in humanitarian projects such as providing food for the poor -- with military financing -- and building schools. Critics compare the circles to Fidel Castro's Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.***

Brazil blocking conference to deal with Latin crises*** Judging from the speeches and the talk in the hallways I heard at a top-level conference on military affairs earlier this week, there is a big bad boy who is blocking plans to solve Latin America's multiple crises -- Brazil. It's not that Brazil has done anything dreadful since the Jan. 1 inauguration of leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said several participants at the meeting on ''Building Regional Security'' organized by the University of Miami's North-South Center. On the contrary, da Silva has proven to be more level-headed than many Washington conservatives had anticipated.

Rather, the problem is that Brazil, the biggest country in South America, is sitting on the sidelines while the neighborhood is afire, several of the speakers said. Brazil is still paralyzed by 19th century fears of U.S. imperial designs, which have long driven it to instinctively reject almost anything coming from Washington or supported by Washington, regardless of its merits, they said. These days, Brazil is effectively blocking a Canadian-sponsored proposal to hold an emergency summit with President Bush and 33 other elected leaders in the hemisphere, aimed at doing something about the escalating crises in Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Haiti and several other countries.

Such a presidential summit would, among other things, force the Bush administration to pay some attention to Latin America, which fell off White House radar screens after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But while the United States, Mexico, Caribbean nations and most South American countries support the emergency summit, which would be held in September in Mexico, Brazil is stone-walling the proposal, Canadian and U.S. officials say. ''Everybody is mystified as to why Brazil doesn't go along,'' says Paul D. Durand, Canada's ambassador to the Organization of American States.***