Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s recent proclamations that President Bush is the devil and that he could still smell the sulphur from Bush’s visit to the UN the day before have largely been covered by the media as laughable and absurd. But if you found yourself guffawing or rolling your eyes you’d be missing the underlying strategy of Latin America’s most powerful and problematic leader. What’s more, you’re probably not who Chávez is talking to, anyway. Beyond the glittering generalities and name-calling is an expertly crafted appeal to Latin America’s masses. For many Latin Americans, to see Hugo Chávez step up to the podium of the UN and berate the leader of the US in front of, quite literally, the whole world was more gratifying than winning the World Cup during Mardi Gras.

Chávez’s use of religious symbolism is, of course, no accident. In Venezuela, Chávez refers to the four private media stations that oppose him as “the four horsemen of the apocalypse.” This religious rhetoric has made Chávez extremely attractive to Latin America’s devout Roman Catholic population, and many of them see Chávez — as he admittedly sees himself — as a Messianic figure come to raise Latin America out of its long history of subordination to the developed world.

Rhetoric is Chávez’s forte: He has the ability to tap into people’s emotions and belief systems. He makes people feel that they can become part of something bigger — that they are playing a role in history by joining his cause. The other crucial ingredient in Chávez’s successful appeal to Latin Americans is his militant nationalism, embodied by his employment of Simón Bolívar as a political symbol.

Just as Bolívar expelled the Spanish from much of South America, Chávez wants to expel US influence from the region, an idea that is welcomed by millions of Latin Americans who view Washington’s long support of the neoliberal model — the combination of privatisation, free trade, and austerity policies — as the cause of what former Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Pérez called the “neutron bomb” of Third World development policy, a policy “that killed people, but left buildings standing.”

Moreover, overextended by the war on terror, the Bush administration — particularly the State Department and US intelligence services — has proved to be completely incapable of stymieing Chávez as he buys arms, builds a million-man militia, forges political ties through petrodiplomacy, eats pudding with Fidel Castro, and continues to broadcast his ideological message throughout the hemisphere.

In short, Chávez can advance his leftist agenda — Bush-bashing the whole way — without fear of reprisal. While some may laugh at Chávez, he will almost certainly be re-elected in December to another six-year term and has even alluded to changing the Constitution so that he can stay in power until 2021. The firebrand who sits atop the largest oil reserves outside the Middle East is not going away anytime soon. — The Christian Science Monitor