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.