CARACAS, Venezuela | Supporters of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez recently erected a bronze bust of Manuel Marulanda, the founder of Latin America’s biggest guerrilla movement, in a Caracas slum.
The Colombian Foreign Ministry responded with a letter to its Venezuelan counterpart protesting the tribute to someone involved in “drug trafficking, homicide, kidnapping, child recruitment and the use of land mines.”
No matter, said Alexis Vielma, a member of the Coordinadora Simon Bolivar, a neighborhood group that put up the statue of the late leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and unveiled it at a rally attended by hundreds of Chavez backers in olive-green T-shirts.
“This is the first of many the community is planning to construct for heroes in South and Central America,” Mr. Vielma said as demonstrators burned the U.S. flag and passed out literature caricaturing Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, a U.S. ally, as Hitler.
Almost 10 years into his presidency, Mr. Chavez is accelerating efforts to eradicate symbols of Caracas’ colonial and pro-American past and rebrand it as a global hub of socialism, pushing for a visual makeover that extols the president’s self-proclaimed revolution.
More government buildings and billboards are painted red, the color symbolizing Mr. Chavez’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela. A mural on the road from the airport to downtown depicts “Uncle Sam” as an imperialist. Busts of Che Guevara, Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata and Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh line a central thoroughfare.
Later this year Mr. Chavez, 54, will dedicate a plaza to Cipriano Castro, a former Venezuelan president who cut diplomatic relations with the U.S. in 1908.
The Chavez-inspired iconography is overshadowing vestiges of the country’s U.S. and colonial ties, including a Plaza Washington, a statue of Abraham Lincoln and an avenue named for Christopher Columbus.
In some cases, the old symbols have been demolished. In 2004, a crowd tore down a statue of Columbus on a holiday celebrating the arrival of Europeans to the New World. The government renamed the avenue formerly in his name to Indigenous Resistance Way.
In January, residents of the 23 de Enero neighborhood, named for the date in 1958 when Venezuela returned to democracy, decapitated a bust of Diego de Lozada, a Spanish conquistador credited with founding Caracas in 1567.
Plaza Washington in the southwestern Caracas neighborhood of El Paraiso was attacked in February with a small explosive that fractured the base of the George Washington statue. A group identified as “We Will Conquer From the United Central Left” claimed responsibility.
“The government is attempting to rewrite Venezuelan history,” said Elias Pino Iturrieta, 63, a historian at Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas. “They’re trying to eliminate concrete links to the past like in Cuba and the Soviet Union for political purposes.”
Andres Izarra, Venezuela’s information minister, wasn’t available to comment, said a ministry spokeswoman. The Culture Ministry did not return phone calls seeking comment.
The government has stood aside during the destruction and allowed vandals to act with impunity, said Caracas historian and journalist Oscar Yanes.
“Like all communist regimes, they’re trying to perpetuate their ’values’ by rededicating public spaces,” said Mr. Yanes, 81. “It’s cheap propaganda intended to confuse.”
In his bid to sever ties with earlier administrations, Mr. Chavez also has changed the country’s official name to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, after the South American colonial-era liberator Simon Bolivar; added a star to the flag; and reconfigured the coat of arms to make its white horse face left.
Chavez opponents have responded in kind, at times. Last year, students marching in central Caracas against his plan to rewrite the constitution defaced a Che Guevara monument, which is now being refurbished.
Administration critics also destroyed a glass monument to Mr. Guevara last October in Merida state in western Venezuela.
The anti-Yankee symbolism coexists with signs of continuing U.S. influence in the private sector.
Shopping malls packed with U.S. products are crowded every weekend, McDonald’s Corp. fast-food chains are common, baseball is the national sport, and U.S. sitcoms air regularly both on local television and cable.
The U.S. also remains Venezuela’s biggest trading partner, as bilateral commerce reached a record $50 billion in 2007, buoyed mostly by oil sales.
While a number of the Caracas plazas and boulevards named after U.S. figures remain intact, that may not last, Mr. Yanes said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if one day the Barrio Kennedy is renamed Barrio Fidel,” he said.
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