PERU: Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez is at the centre of another war of words after threatening to break diplomatic relations with Peru if his preferred candidate did not win a presidential run-off round due there this month.
Peru said it would withdraw its ambassador from Caracas for the second time this year, in protest at "unacceptable and repeated interference" in its internal affairs.
President Chávez is backing Ollanta Humala, a former military rebel whose platform mixes strident economic nationalism with appeals to the racial pride of Peru's mestizo majority.
Votes are still being counted from the first round on April 9th. Mr Humala won with just 30 per cent of the poll but, as no candidate passed 50 per cent, there will be a run-off. Former populist president Alan García is favourite to clinch the second spot in the run-off round. He holds a razor-thin lead over the conservative Lourdes Flores but the final result has been delayed as Ms Flores mounts a legal challenge to have more than 220,000 discarded ballots re-examined.
Mr Chávez's threat came after Mr García criticised Venezuela's demand that Peru abandon a free-trade deal it recently inked with the US. Mr Chávez called Mr García a "thief" and said: "To Ollanta Humala: Go, comrade! Long live Ollanta Humala! Long live Peru!" The business backers of Ms Flores, who struggled to win votes outside Lima, now face the prospect of supporting Mr García to head off the rise of Mr Humala, whom opponents accuse of being a proto-fascist.
There is a deep irony in Mr García being viewed by Peruvian conservatives as a saviour from the threat of Mr Humala.
As president from 1985 to 1990, he ran a spectacularly unsuccessful populist administration which nationalised banks, defaulted on its debts, unleashed hyperinflation of 7,500 per cent and lost control over much of the countryside to Maoist Shining Path guerrillas.
Analysts say Mr García would be a far more challenging opponent for Mr Humala in the run-off. Like Mr Humala, Mr García can draw on support from the poor through his populist Apra party, Peru's oldest, while his democratic credentials will win over former Flores supporters worried about the militaristic Mr Humala. Opinion polls show Mr García would beat Mr Humala in a run-off round with 54 per cent of the vote.
Mr Chávez's anger at US influence in the region has led him to threaten to pull Venezuela out of the four-decade-old Community of Andean Nations (Can) unless fellow Can members Peru and Colombia abandon their recently agreed free-trade deals with the US. Mr Chávez said his neighbours' deals with Washington would open up their markets to "super-subsidised" US goods, hurting Venezuelan exports to its neighbours.
Bolivia and Ecuador round out the five nation trade bloc. Bolivia, whose president Evo Morales is an increasingly close ally of Chavez, has also threatened to leave Can unless its neighbours abandon free trade with the US. Yesterday, he signed a decree nationalising Bolivia's gas reserves, the second-largest in South America, giving the state "absolute control" of hydrocarbons.
But Colombian president Alvaro Uribe was quick to point out that Venezuela sells 1.5 million barrels of oil a day to the US, a commodity that needs no free-trade agreement.
He said Venezuela "should allow other brotherly countries to enter the US market, just like they do with their oil".