Chavez leads rally against Bush visit

Buenos Aires (Argentina): Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez launched another verbal assault on President Bush Friday as he led some 20,000 supporters in an anti-American rally, calling the US leader a "political cadaver" and blasting his policies as "imperialist."

"Gringo go home!" Chavez shouted to raucous applause in a crowded soccer stadium, speaking even as Bush was arriving in neighboring Uruguay as part of a Latin America tour.

Chavez said he didn't come to Buenos Aires to "sabotage" Bush's visit and called the timing a coincidence.

"The US president today is a true political cadaver," Chavez said, alluding to Bush's waning years in office.

"What the little gentleman from the north now exudes is the smell of political death and in a very short time he will be converted into cosmic dust and disappear from the stage.” Chavez added.

In Uruguay, a group of anti-American demonstrators scuffled with bystanders and shattered windows at an American fast-food restaurant in an incident underscoring tensions there as Bush arrived Friday night and was driven to his hotel in a bulletproof limousine.

"Exterminate the Empire!" a masked woman spray-painted on a business facade as some rocks flew in Montevideo.

There was no report of any serious injuries as the visit opened with Uruguay's first leftist president, Tabare Vazquez, who has increasingly sought greater trade with Washington.

In Buenos Aires, Chavez said Bush's five-nation swing would fail to improve America's image and dismissed his pledges of US aid as a cynical attempt to "confuse" Latin Americans.

"I believe the chief objective of the Bush trip is to try to scrub clean the face of the empire in Latin America. But it's too late," Chavez said on Argentine state television. "It seems he's just now discovered that poverty exists in the region."

PAGE_BREAK

At the stadium rally, men and women with children in tow applauded Chavez.

"We are here to show our support of Chavez and our repudiation of Bush and imperialism," said Claudio Hernandez, a Chilean in the crowd. "We are against Bush because of his oil wars and his other policies, which go against the people of the world.

Anti-American and anti-Bush sentiment runs high in the countries on Bush's tour, particularly over the war in Iraq and US trade negotiations.

During his first stop in Sao Paulo, Brazil, riot police fired tear gas and clubbed some protesters after more than 6,000 people held a largely peaceful protest march Thursday.

Brazil's streets were calmer on Friday, though 150 protesters burned a Bush effigy with a swastika on its shirt and a Hitler mustache penciled on its face.

In Argentina, many still blame Washington for tolerating the country's brutal military regimes of 1976-1983, when thousands of dissidents were tortured and killed.

The organisers of Chavez's rally included Mercedes Merono of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group still searching for sons and daughters who vanished after being arrested under military rule.

"This counter-rally is extremely important," she said. "Bush seeks to take advantage of Latin America while Chavez supports the region's independence."

Police put down violent protests in Colombia in advance of Bush's visit there, and in Guatemala, Mayan leaders announced that Indian priests will purify the sacred archaeological site of Iximche to eliminate "bad spirits" after Bush visits there Monday.

"That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people," Guatemalan activist Juan Tiney said.

Bush wraps up his trip next week in Mexico, where a handful of protesters demonstrated Friday outside the US Embassy.