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  Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is determined to woo Latin America away from the influence of its powerful northern neighbor and is making a host of friends and enemies along the way.

  A cross between the swashbuckling Zorro and Robin Hood, Chavez is viewed as a modern day hero by ordinary people, who admire him for his gumption, generosity and openness.  Britain's Sunday Times says Chaves is "riding high on anti-US sentiment".

  Unlike most politicians today, Chaves isn't afraid to speak his mind. His populist rhetoric is lapped up by adoring crowds, who believe the fiery politician is working to better their lives and put their country firmly on the international map.

  At home, he is riding high with the nation's poor. With Venezuelan oil at over US$50 a barrel, Chavez has been able to do what so many leaders could only dream: translate the country's new wealth into tangible improvements in social services for the underprivileged, including free health care, education and food subsidies. As a result, he boasts a 77 per cent approval rating about which most Western leaders can only dream.

  He isn’t exactly flavor of the month with the Venezuelan elite, however. Many of his wealthy compatriots worry that he is empowering the working classes at their expense, and are concerned that some of his reforms may threaten their country's democracy.

  His detractors accuse him of election rigging, seizing private property, closing down radio and television networks for making anti-government statements and incarcerating the more vehement among his critics.

  This concern was recently tapped into by the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has labeled Venezuela a menace to regional democracy.

  Chavez retorted swiftly, saying, "Don't mess with me Condoleezza. Don't mess with me, girl," while cheekily blowing the lady a kiss.

  Chavez usually dubs Ms. Rice 'Condolence' during his weekly radio broadcast "Hello President" and her boss in the Oval Office as "Mr. Danger".

  Britain's Tony Blair was recently told to "go to right to hell" but not before returning the Malvinas (the Argentine name for the Falkland Islands) to Argentina.

  The Venezuelan President's comments are often tinged with humor. For instance, he calls his alliance with Cuba and Bolivia as the "Axis of Good" but few on Pennsylvania Avenue are laughing, especially since he has threatened to withhold oil supplies to the US should he or his country be threatened in any way.

  Chavez believes the Bush administration coverts his country's massive oil and gas reserves and has made it clear he is willing to use the supply or non supply of energy as a weapon, which is something many oil-rich Arab states did during the 1973 war with Israel. Venezuela currently supplies around 15 per cent of America's oil requirement.

  More worrying for the US is the Venezuelan leader's hunt for allies which are similarly unfriendly to US interests. In February, Ms. Rice told Congress that Venezuela and Cuba were Iranian "sidekicks" and announced a US-led campaign to rally international opposition to the Chavez government, which she termed "an inoculation strategy".

  Chavez said he would resist such an "imperial attack". Indeed, he has already told his people to prepare for a US invasion and has expelled an American military attaché, saying he was actively seeking disaffected anti-Chavez military officers. It is also rumored that he has already bought 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles from Russia, military aircraft from Brazil and is in the process of purchasing radar equipment from China.

  The US was particularly enraged during mid-February when the fundamentalist Speaker of the Iranian Parliament Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, visited Chavez for a chat when the latter compared Iran and Venezuela to "brothers who fight for a just world".

  The White House was further irritated by an invitation that Venezuela sent to Hamas leaders to tour Latin America in Chavez' own private airplane.

  Venezuela has also reportedly offered to send millions of dollars of aid to a Hamas-led Palestinian government if the usual international donors pull the plug.

  Cuba's relations with Iran are already well known since it helped Iran to build a genetic laboratory and passed on expertise to facilitate Iran's jamming of American government propaganda broadcasts. The Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is expected to visit Cuba later this year.

  Larry Birns of the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs has referred to the "antics" of Mr. Chavez as a "form of merriment," adding, "he is part buffoon, part visionary and part deadly effective strategist."

  The influential American evangelical preacher Pat Robertson, last year called for Chavez to be "taken out", and was forced to apologize. The statement badly misfired for while Robertson's Christian ethics, or rather lack of them, were the subject of television chat shows and newspaper headlines, his charming Venezuelan target was wowing the UN General Assembly with straight-talking speeches that many of the delegates probably wished they had the courage to have penned themselves.

  Chavez, who has recently been presented with UNESCO's 2005 International Jose Marti Prize for his promotion of Latin American values, began by expressing his desire to see the UN Headquarters moved to "an international city that would host the idea of unity… if the repeated violations to the international rule of law continue." 

  He reminded the world that even though there never were any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that country had been bombed and occupied and urged the American people to be rigorous in demanding the truth from their leaders.

  "Let us not permit a few countries to reinterpret the principles of international law in order to impose new doctrines such as 'pre-emptive warfare," said Chavez, adding for maximum dramatic effect, "Oh, do they threaten us with that preemptive war!

  "Regardless of the conspiracies, the lies spread by powerful media outlets and the permanent threat from the empire and its allies, they even call for the assassination of a president," he said.

  Most of the delegates responded to the speech with a standing ovation. It was met with stony silence by the US and Britain.

  Chavez then went on to dole out 300,000 barrel of free oil to Katrina victims and write checks for the underprivileged in New York's hard bitten Bronx, where vendors did a brisk sale in Hugo Chavez T-shirts and mugs.

  Brought up with five siblings in a thatched hut, Chavez knows first hand what it's like to be underprivileged. A son of poor schoolteachers, he knew the value of education and graduated with a science degree as well as two Master's in military science and engineering. A 17-year-long active military career followed and came to an end in 1992 when he led a failed military coup to topple the government of Carlos Perez.

  Upon his release from jail two years later Chavez became the darling of the masses for standing up to a government most Venezuelans perceived as corrupt. Chavez immediately saw the potential and thrust himself into the limelight as a presidential candidate. He was first sworn in as President in 1999 when he was quick to reject US foreign policy, globalization and privatization.

  Since, he has remained a thorn in the side of the White House, which he claims was responsible for attempts to oust him in April 2002. He further maintains the US government is out to assassinate him.

  If it is true that America was behind the attempted 2002 coup, then it was a bad move for the US to make. Far from rolling over, Chavez fought back and still is gathering together allies, who are prepared to take on US might and influence both within South America and without.

  One of those allies is Cuban President Fidel Castro, whose country has been isolated by the US since America's failed 'Bay of Pigs' invasion in 1961. Like Chavez, Castro is a believer in nationalization, social welfare and agricultural collectivization.

  Once viewed in the international arena as an aging revolutionary has-been, Castro has garnered new respect and serious political influence due to his alliance with the leader of oil-rich Venezuela, which he displayed during a recent IAEA vote on Iran's nuclear program. Cuba along with Venezuela and Syria was one of the few countries to vote 'No'.

  Castro also believes the US has tried on more than one occasion to have him assassinated since 1960 when a box of his favorite cigars was poisoned. Other attempts allegedly involved the Mafia underworld, poisoned food as well as an exploding decorative conch shell and a diving wetsuit infected with lethal bacteria.

  Thanks to his new best friend, Castro now receives around 100,000 barrels of cheap Venezuelan oil a day in return for contingents of approximately 20,000 Cuban medics who provide free health care to the residents of Venezuela's slum areas.

  The new kid on this leftist Latin block is the newly elected Bolivian President Evo Morales, who is that country's first indigenous leader in over 500 years since the Spanish conquest.

  Like Chavez, Morales comes from a humble background and started out as a llama herder and part-time trumpet player before emerging as leader of his country's coca workers. But unlike Chavez, Morales has no university degrees. Instead, he has completed the 'University of Life' he says.

  One of the first things Morales did after taking office at the end of December, 2005 was cut his own salary by 57 per cent. He also promised to nationalize the country's gas reserves, work on garnering international acceptance for the coca crop - harmless before it is converted into cocaine - and redistribute land to poor peasants.

  He then went on a whirlwind tour of the neighborhood, first visiting Cuba, where he signed a bi-lateral cooperation agreement and referred to both Castro and Chavez as "commanders of the forces for the liberation of the Americas and the world".

  Next stop was Caracas, where Chavez offered Bolivia 150,000 barrels of diesel each month in exchange for agricultural produce.

  And then it was on to Spain, where he met King Juan Carlos in an unforgettable brightly colored alpaca wool sweater that was lambasted by some of the more snobbish elements in the Spanish media.

  After brief stops in France, Belgium, China and South Africa, where he was warmly welcomed, his tour ended in Brazil on January 13. There, he agreed with President Lula da Silva to work on alleviating poverty. 

  Da Silva supported Morales during his presidential campaigning and his Worker's Party is considered one of the main forces behind the spread of socialism throughout Latin America.

  Lula's government was tarnished by a corruption scandal in 2005 but he still strives for solutions to drugs, violent crime and poverty. Lula knows what it is like to go hungry, too, after being brought up in one room along with his eight brothers and sisters. Lula began working in a dry cleaner's at the age of 12 and left to shine shoes and, later, to work in a factory, where he rose through the trade union movement.

  Although sympathetic to the Chavez, Castro, Morales trio, Lula da Silva is seen as a low key player, managing to maintain reasonably amicable relations with the US. For many in Latin America Chavez embodies the potential for change that Lula once possessed but couldn't translate into reality.

  Of particular concern to the US is the way that Chavez is using his country's oil and gas exports to woo regional allies to its overriding goal, which, according to the BBC, is economic integration for Latin America.

  During an interview with the BBC, Venezuela's Minister for Oil Rafael Ramirez said: "It was an absurd situation where for the past 100 years of oil production here in Venezuela, we didn’t ship a single barrel of petroleum to the Caribbean, Brazil, Argentina or Uruguay."

  Today Venezuela is providing cheap oil to Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and, of course, Cuba. But there is no such thing as a free lunch or cheap oil without strings. In return, Venezuela expects political loyalty.

  It is generally believed that Venezuelan oil and gas is being used to massage a new Venezuelan-led Caribbean/Latin American block, strong and united enough to be able to stand up to the US. Whether the Venezuelan leader will succeed will depend on how seriously Washington takes the threat and how committed Chavez and friends are towards facing up to the big guns.

  In the meantime, the US President is searching for new sources of energy in a wish to relieve America's dependency on foreign oil. In light of the current climate down south, that sounds like a good idea.