Chavez is troublemaker to be watched

A week or so ago, some Americans might have been hard put to recognize Hugo Chavez or identify his place in the political spectrum of Latin America.

But last weekend in Argentina changed all that. TV networks showed a flamboyant Chavez railing against America before an applauding crowd of 25,000 in a soccer stadium, while thousands more demonstrators were setting bonfires and breaking windows in protest against President Bush, who was attending a summit meeting of 33 other regional leaders.

Chavez, a former army officer who has become president of Venezuela, is using that country's oil-wealth as a platform to champion an anti-American brand of revolutionary socialism throughout Latin America. He has been supporting a variety of radical movements throughout the area and is particularly enamored with Fidel Castro and his communist regime in Cuba. He has also embarked Venezuela itself on an autocratic path while diminishing the institutions that are central to democracy.

President Bush wisely avoided any confrontation that might have afforded the Venezuelan leader any more publicity than he got this weekend. But Chavez has popped up on the Bush administration's foreign policy screen as a troublemaker who must be watched.

Chavez's influence was clearly felt at the summit meeting in Argentina, because though the United States, Mexico and 27 other nations voted to set an April deadline for talks on a free-trade zone championed by the United States, Venezuela joined with influential Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay to block that. President Chavez boasted that he had come to the summit meeting to "bury," the trade plan, arguing that it would "enslave" Latin American workers. He called the plan for a Free Trade Area of the Americas an "annexation plan" that would destroy local industries and give America political and economic domination over the region. President Bush and Presidents Reagan and Clinton before him have supported the free-trade concept as one that would benefit both the United States and participating Latin American and Caribbean countries.

What bolsters Chavez's stature both at home and abroad is oil, the export of which brings in some $30 billion a year to Venezuela. It has been a bonanza of late due to its sky-rocketing market price. At home, Chavez has used the proceeds to improve public facilities, particularly medical, for the poor, thereby making them politically indebted to him. Abroad, he has succeeded Russia as Cuba's rich uncle, supplying oil to Castro at highly subsidized prices after the Russians cast Cuba adrift. In return, Castro has sent thousands of Cuban doctors to Venezuela, infiltrated, according to some Castro opponents, by Cuban military and security officers.