Americas Features
Chavez's anti-US rhetoric supported by Venezuelans
By DPA
Dec 4, 2006, 9:56 GMT

Caracas - With President Hugo Chavez heading toward re-election, Venezuela's electorate was giving its overwhelming support to a man who combines an aggressive anti-US rhetoric and a buoyant oil business with the United States.

The charismatic Chavez, 52, has cultivated a controversial style that reached its zenith in September, when he called US President George W Bush 'the devil' before the UN General Assembly in New York.

An eloquent, verbose and often amusing orator, he presents himself as the representative of the people and speaks to Venezuelans through his weekly TV programme and in frequent radio and television addresses.

In comparison, opposition candidate Manuel Rosales, a quiet man and a teacher by training, appeared uncharismatic and dull.

Partial official results in Sunday's voting showed Chavez would gain a further six-year mandate. With 78 per cent of the votes counted, the left-wing populist incumbent was receiving 61 per cent of the ballots to social democrat Rosales' 38 per cent, electoral authorities said late Sunday.

The populist Chavez has proclaimed his wish to apply '21st-century socialism' in the world's fifth-largest crude oil exporter and has adopted red as the colour of his 'revolution,' inspired by Christ and the ideas of South American independence hero Simon Bolivar, he said.

Indeed, the close friend of Cuban President Fidel Castro defined his campaign in his ever-present rhetoric of US 'imperialism.'

'[The opposition] defends capitalism,' he said. 'We defend socialism and sovereignty - a free, developed country, a Venezuela that turns into a power. There are simply two positions, the rest are fairytales.'

A soldier by training, Chavez jumped into the national spotlight in February 1992 when he led a failed military coup. Chavez was arrested and tried but went free after a presidential pardon in 1994.

He finally reached the presidency in 1998 through democratic means at the head of a left-wing coalition that won 57 per cent of the votes.

Since then, the man who engineered two extra years in his first term through a constitutional change, has proved himself a political survivor, overcoming a coup, a damaging oil strike and a recall vote. He shattered the opposition time and again at the polls amid as yet unsubstantiated accusations of fraud.

At home, Chavez has used Venezuela's vast oil income to create more than 1 million jobs and provide free education and health care for the country's poor. The government said the proportion of the poor fell from 50 per cent of Venezuela's 26 million people in 1999 to the current 39 per cent.

The opposition dismissed the services as vote-buying by Chavez, who, it charged, uses the programmes to spy on Venezuela's people. Whatever the case, the president retains the support of a vast majority of the Venezuelan electorate and showed it yet again on Sunday.

'In this country, no one had taken care of the poor before Chavez,' housewife Janeth Hurtado said before the election.

However, Chavez's radical political and economic reforms and the readjustment of social and institutional forces in Venezuela have polarized the country, according to supporters and critics alike.

Chavez's leadership has gone far beyond his country's borders. He has opposed the United States and Washington-sponsored plans like the Free Trade Area of the Americas and proposed countering northern influence through a Latin American alliance centred on the Mercosur trade group, headed by Brazil and Argentina - which he joined earlier this year soon after leaving the Andean Community.

Chavez's open support for leftist politicians in Peru, Ecuador and other Latin American countries earned him accusations of interference in the domestic politics of other nations.

He has granted cheap oil and financed numerous programmes across Latin America and even offered help to the citizens of New Orleans after the US city was devastated by Hurricane Katrina last year.

Beyond politics, rhetoric and efforts to diversify trade, however, the United States has remained the destination of more than 50 per cent of Venezuela's oil exports.