U.S. ousts Venezuelan diplomat

The row between Washington and Caracas widened yesterday when the United States expelled a Venezuelan diplomat in retaliation for the removal of a U.S. naval attache in Venezuela on spying charges.

The State Department gave Jeny Figueredo Frias, chief of staff to Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez Herrera with the senior rank of minister-counselor, 72 hours to leave the country.

The department said its decision was strictly a response to the expulsion Thursday of Cmdr. John Correa, a naval attache at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, and had nothing to do with Miss Frias’ activities in Washington.

“We don’t like to get into tit-for-tat games with the Venezuelan government like this, but they initiated this, and we were forced to respond,” said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.

He acknowledged that the jobs of Miss Frias and Cmdr. Correa are very different but said that she was “the most appropriate person” to be chosen among the embassy staff.

Although Miss Frias was not much involved in daily dealings with the U.S. government, she appears to have played a major role in managing the embassy and providing counsel to the ambassador.

“There is no objective reason to ask” Miss Frias to leave, Mari Pili Hernandez, Venezuela’s deputy foreign minister for North America, said on state television. “We will comply with this measure, but the terms in which it has been expressed cannot be accepted by the Venezuelan government.”

President Hugo Chavez announced Cmdr. Correa’s expulsion in a televised speech celebrating the seventh anniversary of his government. He accused the American of passing secret information from Venezuelan military officers to the Pentagon.

“We warn the imperial government of the United States that, if their military attaches in Venezuela continue to do what this captain has been doing, they will be detained,” he said. “The next step would be to withdraw the whole so-called military mission of the United States.”

Also on Thursday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld compared Mr. Chavez to Adolf Hitler during an event at the National Press Club.

“We’ve got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money,” Mr. Rumsfeld said. “He’s a person who was elected legally — just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally — and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others.”

Evo Morales, the newly elected president of Bolivia, ran an aggressive anti-U.S. campaign and has become another thorn in Washington’s side.

Mr. Chavez accuses Washington of playing a role in a short-lived coup in April 2002 — an assertion the Bush administration has repeatedly rejected.

Mr. McCormack said the administration’s problem with Mr. Chavez is that, even though democratically elected, he is not governing in a democratic manner.