By Jeremy Morgan
Latin American Herald Tribune staff

CARACAS – President Hugo Chávez abruptly ended his mysterious four-day absence from the airwaves, returning in familiar style with a lengthy appearance on television Tuesday evening in which he threw a gauntlet down to President Barack Obama.

Chávez was out to prove that there had indeed been a plot against his life in El Salvador, saying that this was why he hadn’t appeared at the swearing-in of the new president of that country, Mauricio Funes, last Monday.

In a peroration lasting several hours in which he also detected corruption in the construction industry, among a hit list of other items, Chávez insisted that the United States extradite Luis Posada Carriles.

This is an individual who’s been on the Wanted list in Venezuela for years. He’s accused of planting a bomb which brought down a Cuban aircraft bound for Havana in 1976, killing all 73 people on board.

Earlier this decade, Posada Carriles was found to be living in the United States, at which point Venezuela demanded his extradition. Amid claims that Posada Carriles had been on the payroll of the CIA in some capacity or other, he was instead tried and convicted of illegally entering the United States.

Posada Carriles became yet another bone of contention between Chávez and the Bush Administration. Caracas accused Washington of protecting Posada Carriles even as it pursued its high-profile “war against terrorism.” The background to this was Chávez repeated assertions, just as frequently denied by the United States, that senior officials in Washington were conspiring to kill Chávez, invade Venezuela and seize its oil riches.

On Tuesday evening, Chávez claimed there’d been a plan to fire a missile at the aircraft which he’d intended to use to get to El Salvador. For several years, Central America had been the “yankee backyard” and Posada Carriles had lived in El Salvador.

The extradition demand levelled at Obama implied that Chávez believed this no longer to be the case. Even so, Chávez said he was in no doubt that people “left behind by Posada Carriles” in El Salvador had been involved in this week’s supposed assassination plot.

“Obama, send us this terrorist because we’re waiting here to put him in prison, where he should be as a murderer,” Chávez declared, throwing the accusation of “genocide” against Posada Carriles as well.

“There, in the United States, he’s tranquil,” Chávez continued. “What’s going on, President Obama. Where’s justice?” In this middle of this, Chávez briefly switched to broken English: “What happened, my friend?”

At this point, Chávez appeared to remember not to go overboard. While the United States had been behind “these terrorist plans” he emphasized he wasn’t accusing Obama himself.

“I’m not blaming Obama,” he intoned. “I believe that Obama has good intentions, but behind him there’s an empire, the CIA and all its tentacles, terrorists and intelligence organizations. It’s time to dismantle this machine of terror that the United States runs.”

Chávez was also intent on not letting anybody get the idea that he’d taken fright for no good reason. “I’m not going to suspend a journey because of a simple rumor. I comply with my agenda in a rigorous manner, at times submitting to intense efforts” he said.

As to his failure to broadcast his regular Sunday broadcast, Aló Presidente – about which they has been much speculation – Chávez reiterated the official explanation that this had been because of “technical reasons” and insisted this was the truth.

“It really was a technical fault that took place at the last moment,” Chávez told his audience. But then he quickly reverted to the alleged assassination plot.

What he’d originally planned to do was to get through the program and then take a Cubana de Aviación aircraft to San Salvador for Funes’ inauguration. But on Saturday he’d sent an official to find out “more information” – and once he’d received this, “I realized that the journey had been put at risk, the information acquired characteristics of high credibility and we decided to suspend the flight.”

Just in case somebody still hadn’t gotten the message, Interior and Justice Minister Tarek El Assaimi followed up on Wednesday with a statement that the authorities had frustrated a plot “of almost perfect planning” to do away with the president.

The minister was at a meeting aimed at coordinating “citizen security” and claimed that people, who typically he didn’t name, were also out to decry official statements about plots against the president be treating them in a “banal” manner.

But, he insisted, there were “external and internal sectors” which saw assassinating the president “as a violent way out of a process that’s begun.” Héctor Rodríguez, youth coordinator of the president’s ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), took alarm at the ramifications of any such prospect.

Were Chávez to be killed, he warned, this would “provoke an era of destabilization, not only in Venezuela, but in “all the Latin American region.” Instead of plotting, he said, it would be better if “the Venezuelan and international Right compete in an open and democratic space if they really wanted to convince people of their good intentions.”

Energy and Oil Minister Rafael Ramírez announced that the government would not tolerate any plan to destabilize the country. He was in the oil-rich state of Zulia, which is controlled by the Opposition and which he claimed was the constant target of a “conspiracy led from Peru.”

This was evidently a reference to Opposition Maracaibo Mayor Manuel Rosales, who is living in self-imposed exile having been granted political asylum by the government of Peru. Rosales vanished from Venezuela before he was to face trial on corruption charges brought by the government.

However, for all his warnings about destabilization, Ramírez, who’s also head of the state oil corporation, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), insisted all was normal in the oil industry and along the eastern coast of Lake Maracaibo. Reports of an explosion injuring 14 people were “false,” he said.