Chavez rallies Venezuela against 'Mr. Danger'

CARACAS, Venezuela -- The White House may be focused on Iraq and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but in Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez's most pressing concern seems to be the Bush administration. Or, as he frequently puts it, the administration's grand plans to kill him and invade this oil-rich country.

The threats are so great, Chavez has said, that he has been forced to cancel numerous public appearances and create a civilian militia force that will make the Yankee hordes "bite the dust." And he warns that if the Americans are so foolish as to invade, "you can forget the Venezuelan oil."

"If the government of the United States attempts to commit the foolhardy enterprise of attacking us, it would be embarked on a 100- year war," Chavez told Ted Koppel in a "Nightline" interview in September. "We are prepared. They would not manage to control Venezuela, the same way they haven't been able to control Iraq."

Wherever he can -- in speeches, interviews, inaugurations of public works projects, his weekly television show -- Chavez rings the alarm bell. "If something happens to me," Chavez warned in August, "the responsible one will be President George W. Bush."

With every warning about Mr. Danger -- the Venezuelan government's title for Bush -- American officials offer weary denials, a flurry of them coming after Pat Robertson, the televangelist and Bush supporter, suggested this summer on his television show that the United States should assassinate the Venezuelan president.

On the CNN program "Late Edition" on Oct. 9, Robertson was back on the attack, citing unidentified sources who accused Chavez of sending "either $1 million or $1.2 million in cash" to Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11 attacks and asserting that Venezuela was trying to acquire a nuclear weapons capacity. The Venezuelan vice president, Jose Vicente Rangel, dismissed Robertson's remarks, saying, "He's crazy, at the very least."

With each threat and criticism from the north, real or imagined, Chavez lashes back, seemingly thriving on the atmosphere of confrontation. In this, veteran observers of the Latin American left see history repeating itself, and not necessarily as farce.

Wayne Smith, a former American diplomat in Cuba, said he saw a parallel with the antagonistic relationship 10 American presidents have had with the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who survived the CIA- sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion and, El Comandante says, several assassination attempts.

"He plays David to our Goliath in a way that reverberates splendidly in Latin America," said Smith, now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington. "Now, Chavez is doing the same thing."

The whole war of words raises a question frequently asked in Caracas and Washington: Is Chavez paranoid or, as with Castro, is there some substance to his claim?

Or is Chavez simply out to raise his own standing as a regional leader by taking on an American president who is hugely unpopular in Latin America and widely regarded as a trigger-happy imperialist? After Hurricane Katrina hit, Chavez loudly accused Bush of bungling the rescue effort. On his trip to New York for a U.N. summit meeting in September, he made it a point to veer into two heavily Democratic and poor neighborhoods of the Bronx, where he offered to provide home heating oil at cut-rate prices and to underwrite an environmental study of the polluted Bronx River.

"He said, 'I don't have a problem with the American people, I have some problems with some people in the American government,' " recounted Rep. Jose E. Serrano, D-N.Y., who had invited the Venezuelan president to the borough. "He then held up both flags."

Serrano added, "You cannot deny that there are some people in this government who would like to see Chavez gone."

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