Venezuela leader takes aim at President Bush, calling him ‘the devil’

UNITED NATIONS – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called President Bush “the devil” in a fiery speech to the United Nations, but later reached out to an audience of Americans, saying he sees himself as a friend of the United States.
The leftist leader, long at odds with Washington, appeared to be making one of his boldest moves yet to coalesce international opposition to the Bush administration. Chavez began Wednesday’s speech noting that Bush spoke from the same podium a day earlier.
“The devil came here,” Chavez said. “Right here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of.”
He then made the sign of the cross, brought his hands together as if praying and looked up to the ceiling.
Chavez’s words drew tentative giggles at times from the audience, but also some applause.
He later spoke to hundreds of New Yorkers who filled a college hall Wednesday night, saying he hopes Americans choose an “intelligent president” in the future.
“I’m not an enemy of the United States. I’m a friend of the United States … the people of the United States,” Chavez said during his speech to an audience including union organizers and professors. “They’re two very different things you the people of the United States, and the government that’s installed there.”
He drew a standing ovation when he said Bush committed genocide during the war in Iraq.
“The president of the United States should go before an international tribunal,” Chavez said as applause filled the hall at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He compared the Bush administration’s actions to those of the Nazis.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said earlier that Chavez’s remarks in the United Nations were “not becoming for a head of state.”
“I am not going to dignify a comment by the Venezuelan president to the president of the United States,” Rice told reporters.
The main U.S. seat in the United Nations was empty as Chavez spoke, though U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said a “junior note-taker” was present, as is customary “when governments like that speak.”
The Venezuelan has become Latin America’s leading voice against the U.S. government, and his speeches were reminiscent of crusading addresses by his mentor Fidel Castro of Cuba and the late Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
Chavez accused the U.S. of planning and financing a failed 2002 coup against him, a charge the U.S. denies. And he said the U.S. tries to impose its vision of democracy militarily in countries such as Iran and Iraq.
He called U.S. consumerism “madness” at a marathon news conference, saying Americans have wasteful habits in using oil and energy. He held up a satellite photo showing the world at night, with bright light emanating from the U.S. and other wealthy countries.
The United States continues to be the top buyer of Venezuelan oil, bringing the South American country billions of dollars in earnings that help fund Chavez’s popular social programs.