Chavez loves Obama, loves him not, loves him

Just days away from their first meeting at the Summit of the Americas, Hugo Chavez will have to decide if he’ll profess to smell sulfur or roses in President Obama’s presence.

His seesawing statements have shown Chavez’s sentiments swinging from love to hate to love before Obama has finished his first 100 days. Once the Venezuelan and American presidents meet in Trinidad and Tobago on Friday, though, there will undoubtedly be some new sound bites to indicate the desired direction of relations with “the empire,” as Chavez has called the U.S. in a less-than-flattering manner over the years.

{mosads}Obama will come into the summit fresh off a Thursday visit to Mexico, where immigration, drug-cartel violence and resulting border concerns will top the talks with Mexican President Felipe Calderon. Chavez will come to Trinidad and Tobago having just held the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas summit in Caracas, which he was planning with the Castro brothers in Cuba over the weekend.

Cuba, incidentally, is the only nation not invited to the Summit of the Americas, but received a friendly gesture last week from a handful of Congress members who visited the island and are urging Obama to end the decades-old embargo against the communist nation.

Administration officials have demurred when asked if Chavez and Obama would meet for one-on-one talks during the summit, saying last week that the president’s schedule should include standard, closed-door meetings between all 34 heads of state as well as a few group sit-downs. Summit adviser Jeffrey S. Davidow said in a State Department press conference last week that meals could also offer chitchat opportunities, without singling out Obama or Chavez in particular.

“The president would be honored to meet with some of the groups in Latin America, the groups of governments, because it is difficult to try to establish 33 bilateral meetings in the course of a day and a half,” Davidow said. “But I know that the president is going to Trinidad with the desire and the interest to talk to all of his colleagues.”

Banking on his most recent statement, Chavez would love the chance — not to just talk with Obama and rekindle soured relations, but to wipe out nuclear weapons together.

According to Spanish news agency EFE, Chavez on Tuesday said Obama had “good intentions,” and he “hopes to reinstate normal relations” with the United States. “I hope that [Obama] will succeed in imposing his fresh presence. Hence, we will support him completely,” Chavez told reporters on a visit to Japan.

In reference to Obama’s anti-proliferation speech in Prague, Chavez expects Obama “to reach an agreement with the countries in possession of atomic bombs, in order to destroy them and use the nuclear technology to generate electric power. …We Venezuelans do not want more atomic bombs.

“The day will come when we will be friends of the United States,” Chavez said.

That day wasn’t March 22, when Chavez blasted Obama on his regular “Alo Presidente” TV show. “He goes and accuses me of exporting terrorism: The least I can say is that he’s a poor ignoramus; he should read and study a little to understand reality,” Chavez said of the American president.

{mospagebreak}”When I saw Obama saying what he said, I put the decision back in the drawer; let’s wait and see,” Chavez added about sending a new ambassador to Washington.

On an April 1 visit to Tehran, Chavez wasn’t much more optimistic. “I don’t have much hope, because behind him is an empire. He’s the president of an empire. … Now, I think it’s fair to give him some time. … Seeing is believing,” Chavez said. “I hope President Obama is the last president of the Yankee empire, and the first president of a truly democratic republic, the United States.”

{mosads}Two days before the presidential election, though, Chavez, coming off a stormy relationship with the Bush administration, seemed in high spirits about the prospect for normalizing relations and said he would meet “on equal and respectful terms” with Obama should the Democratic nominee win the election. “Hopefully with Obama, we will enter a new phase,” Chavez said.

The day before the presidential election, Chavez reached out to “the black man” in Spanish newspaper El Pais: “Tomorrow the U.S. will have an election. The world awaits the arrival of a black president to the United States, we can say this is no small feat. … We don’t ask him to be a revolutionary, nor a socialist, but that he rise to the moment in the world.”

But the positivity didn’t last long. Days before Obama’s inauguration, Chavez lashed out at Obama for comments stating that Chavez hindered progress in Latin America and backed Colombian Marxist guerrillas. “We need to be firm when we see this news, that Venezuela is exporting terrorist activities or supporting malicious entities like the FARC,” Obama told Univision.

“Could it be he’s confusing me with Bush?” Chavez fired back. “Bush has been the one who has interrupted world progress, has sunk it into an abyss.

“There is still time for [Obama] to correct these views, though,” Chavez added. “We will wait and see, we will know him by his actions. He is really an unknown.

“No one should say that I threw the first stone at Obama; he threw it at me!” Chavez said.

Chavez ratcheted up the rhetoric by saying that Obama had “the same stench” — the scent of sulfur that Chavez claimed he smelled on the podium at the United Nations in 2006 after “devil” President Bush spoke — as his predecessor.

But as the new president turned his attention to the economic recession and put foreign policy on the back burner, Chavez’s tone has softened from adversarial to advisory.

“It’s regrettable, the crisis that the U.S. is living through,” Chavez said on state television March 6. “I recommend to Obama — they’re criticizing him because they say he’s moving toward socialism — come, Obama, ally with us on the path to socialism, it’s the only road.

“Imagine a socialist revolution in the U.S.,” Chavez urged. “Nothing is impossible.”

Brazil, whose president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, was one of the first foreign leaders hosted at the White House by Obama, has urged the U.S. and Venezuela to kiss and make up. On Thursday, Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said the time for rapprochement was approaching. “It is necessary that they build confidence, so that scars of the past stop being an obstacle for future relations,” he said. “I think a better relation is near.”

Even though Obama made reaching out to all nations sans preconditions a cornerstone of his campaign — and has already initiated contact with Syria and Iran — Davidow said the focus of the summit will be broader than smoothing out relations between the U.S. and Venezuela.

“The president is going, as he has said on his other trips, in the spirit of dealing with these other nations as partners,” the summit adviser said. “He is not going to Trinidad with a plan for the hemisphere. He is going to Trinidad with the intention of listening, discussing and dealing with his colleagues as partners.

“One of his concerns, and indeed the concerns of everyone at the summit, but particularly of the president and the secretary of State, is the question of equity,” Davidow added. “We know that there has been progress, as I’ve mentioned, in this hemisphere on Gross Domestic Product increase and reduction of poverty, particularly abject poverty. But the fact remains that Latin America, according to the United Nations, is the least equal of all the areas of the world.”

The world will be unified, though, in watching this week to see what happens when Obama and Chavez meet face to face — and what happens afterward.