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War of Images Illustrates Colliding Views of Chavez ***CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug. 21 -- Pedro Leon Zapata and Regulo Perez are lifelong friends and artistic rivals. Each has enjoyed a perch on the editorial pages of the nation's leading newspapers where, for decades, they have published political caricatures skewering the powerful.

They are also leading lights in Venezuela's modern art movement, one of the most important in Latin America. Zapata, in particular, has captured the public imagination with his fanciful murals and canvases that have recently taken on a distinctly anti-government shade.

Today, while still friends, Zapata and Perez are also antagonists in the political drama that is moving toward a climax.

Squinting behind thick, oval glasses, Zapata, 74, said the intense political debate compelled him to express his opposition to President Hugo Chavez in his painting, and he now uses the Venezuelan flag as "an emblem of opposition."

Perez, 73, running his fingers through a shock of gray hair, said he has tried to defend the president by using the flag as a "fascist symbol" in a series of paintings portraying the opposition movement as elitist and mercenary.

In art, as in life here, Chavez has become a challenge.

Once faithfully leftist and mostly detached from political life, Venezuela's modern art community is now deeply divided over Chavez and his populist program to lift up the country's poor. Not since the years after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, when the artistic left fractured over Venezuela's own short-lived guerrilla movement, has the insular art world here been so shaken. ***

Chavez foes slam land grants - 'Agrarian Reform' and "Land Redistribution' in Venezuela***Under the law, the land distributed to the peasants is still owned by the state, and the government must encourage the formation of peasant cooperatives and collective farms, where the state is to provide housing, health care and education. The law also gives the government power to dictate how private land can be used, based on soil conditions and the country's food-security needs.

Critics argue that the law violates the right to private property and is a throwback to state-planned communist economies.

"The model of the collective farm doesn't respond to our reality," said Roque Carmona, founder of Campesino Alliance, a nonprofit organization that helps small-scale farmers. "It looks good on paper, nothing more."

Government officials maintain that the ban on giving up ownership of state property is an attempt to avoid the failures of past land reforms in Venezuela and elsewhere, in which small farmers who lacked credit or government support eventually had to sell their plots to large landowners.

They also argue that forming peasant cooperatives is the only way campesinos can compete with large agribusinesses.

Mr. Chavez has defended the law in terms of social justice and by appealing to the need for "food security," mandated by the constitution passed in 1999 during his first year as president.***