Leaders' hard lines give U.S. envoy to Venezuela a tough test

CARACAS, Venezuela - (KRT) - After one of his first meetings with a Venezuelan government official, the new U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, William Brownfield, took some questions from local reporters. Then he took some more. When it became clear they were not going to let him go quickly, he told them, ``I won't bother you anymore.''

The journalists laughed, and Brownfield walked away.

Brownfield is going to need more of this type of levity if he is to survive his new job, arguably the hardest diplomatic post in the hemisphere right now. Neither Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez nor President Bush has made it a secret that they do not like the other. The leftist-populist Chavez considers Cuba's Fidel Castro his mentor and has accused Bush of backing plots to overthrow him. Bush administration officials have accused Chavez of sympathizing with leftist rebels in neighboring Colombia and fomenting political unrest in other parts of Latin America.

''To a large extent, this is going to be one of the major tests of the Bush administration in Latin America,'' said Michael Shifter, director of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington, D.C., think tank. ``This could go in different directions. It could be confrontational, which has only strengthened Chavez. It could be a fresh look.''
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He replaced Charles Shapiro, who left Caracas in August after a bit more than two years here, in part frustrated by Chavez's personal attacks on him. Shapiro, who had just arrived in Caracas when Chavez was nearly toppled in a 2002 coup, is now deputy assistant secretary of state at the Bureau for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

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