Y QUE VIVA CHAVEZ.....!!!!

CARACAS, Venezuela - The White House may be focused on Iraq and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but in Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez'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.

Carlos Villalon for The New York Times
Mr. Chávez visited the Bronx in September, offering cut-rate home heating oil and financing for a study of the polluted Bronx River.

David Rochkind/Polaris, for The New York Times
A platoon of Venezuelans trained as civilian soldiers over the summer. Venezuelans have joined civilian militias, answering President Hugo Chávez's call to help protect the country and its oil reserves from invasion.
The threats are so great, Mr. Chávez 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," Mr. Chávez 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 - Mr. Chávez rings the alarm bell. "If something happens to me," he warned in August, "the responsible one will be President George W. Bush."

With every warning about Mr. Danger - the Venezuelan government's title for Mr. Bush - American officials offer weary denials, a flurry of them coming after Pat Robertson, a religious broadcaster 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, Mr. Robertson was back on the attack, citing unidentified sources who accused Mr. Chávez 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, José Vicente Rangel, dismissed Mr. Robertson's remarks, saying, "He's crazy, at the very least."]

With each threat and criticism from the north, real or imagined, Mr. Chávez 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 C.I.A.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion and several assassination attempts.

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

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

Or is Mr. Chávez 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, Mr. Chávez loudly accused Mr. Bush of bungling the rescue effort. On his trip to New York for a United Nations 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 Representative Jose E. Serrano, a Bronx Democrat who had invited Mr. Chávez to the borough. "He then held up both flags."

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

Bush administration officials may not hide their distaste for Mr. Chávez - that, everyone agrees, is a big part of the problem - but American officials still cringe at the accusations, which they dismiss as ludicrous.

"The U.S. has not planned, is not planning, will not plan and cannot plan to assassinate Hugo Chávez," the American ambassador to Venezuela, William Brownfield, said in Caracas. "It would be a violation of both U.S. law and policy."

In Venezuela, though, where state television has broadcast video images of American officials criticizing Mr. Chávez as the evil empire music from "Star Wars" plays in the background, the threat is taken seriously. After all, as Venezuelan officials frequently point out, it was not all that long ago that the Bush administration gave tacit support to a coup that briefly toppled Mr. Chávez.

Venezuela has purchased 100,000 AK-47 assault rifles from Russia, and is acquiring combat planes from Brazil. Across the country, civilian militias are hard at work preparing for war, training volunteers like Josefina Rojas, 43, who showed up at a National Guard base on a recent day.

"I want to protect the president," she said. "I would defend the fatherland."

In August, the Bush administration was even put on trial for crimes against humanity during the World Festival of Students and Youth. The verdict in the mock proceeding was guilty, not surprisingly. Vice President Rangel presided and Mr. Chávez was a crucial prosecution witness. The prosecutor was Eva Golinger, a New York lawyer beloved by the Chávez government for making public American documents that detail how much money opposition groups in Venezuela have received from the National Endowment for Democracy, which is financed by the American Congress.

In the poor barrios where Mr. Chávez draws much of his support, residents worry about C.I.A. infiltrators and reports of American warships off the coast. People often watch the president on television, and are ready to heed his warnings.

"You have to prepare, the president says so," said José Gutiérrez, 42. "He's telling the truth. If the president says something, then it's true."

Another stalwart is Bleidis Cabarcas, 49. "Can you imagine if they kill him, all this would end," she said in her home, where a picture of Mr. Chávez hangs on a wall. "But you see what happened in Iraq and other places. Venezuela cannot let this happen here."