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Peru, Venezuela quarrel after latest Chavez jibe
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-01-12 09:24
Venezuela and Peru stepped up their diplomatic quarrel on Wednesday with
Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo accusing Venezuela's Hugo Chavez of meddling
and trying to destabilize the region.
Venezuela responded by calling Toledo, who has an approval rating among
Peruvians of just 8 percent, overly sensitive and a governmental failure.
"Let it be clear, Hugo Chavez is not the president of Latin America," Toledo
told local radio. "He can have all the petrodollars he wants but that doesn't
give him the right to destabilize the region."
The spat began last week when Chavez, a retired army officer with anti-U.S.,
pro-Cuba sentiments, expressed his support for a nationalist candidate in Peru's
April presidential election. Lima responded by recalling its ambassador to
Caracas but Venezuela later said the matter had been patched up.
Chavez revived the spat on Tuesday by criticizing another Peruvian candidate
as a representative of "Peru's oligarchy," setting off Toledo.
"I won't allow Chavez to meddle in Peru's internal policies. We demand
respect," said Toledo, who added that he would speak to the Venezuelan president
later this month at the swearing-in ceremony of Bolivia's President-elect Evo
Morales.
Venezuelan Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel responded to Toledo on
Wednesday by calling Peru's government "baby-skinned" and "movingly sensitive"
and rejected his charges Chavez was a destabilizing factor in the region.
"His political opinions without a doubt are clouded by the immense failure
which characterizes his government," Rangel said in a statement.
In his latest comments on the Peruvian presidential field, Chavez said in a
speech that Lourdes Flores, Peru's pro-market, center-right candidate,
represented "Peru's oligarchy" in a country where more than half the population
lives on $1.25 a day or less.
Flores apparently antagonized Chavez with a visit she made to Venezuela in
2001, where she criticized the anti-U.S. leader as undemocratic and compared him
to Peru's disgraced ex-President Alberto Fujimori, who dissolved Congress during
his hard-line 1990-2000 rule.
Chavez had sparked the diplomatic squabble with Lima last week when he
praised Peru's other leading candidate, Ollanta Humala, for his nationalist
policies at a meeting in Caracas.
Humala, a former army commander who led a brief rebellion in 2000, has scared
investors with his plans to renegotiate contracts with foreign companies to
benefit Peru's poor. Chavez said that would bring a "second independence" for
the Andean nation.
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