MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Chavez in Bolivia laughs at US diminishing aid

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his Bolivian counterpart Evo Morales

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez visited flood-ravaged Bolivia on Saturday to show off the fact that his country has pledged 10 times more aid than the United States Bush administration.

Bolivia was the latest stop on a Chavez tour intended to upstage President Bush's own trip through Latin America. While Bush visited Brazil on Friday, Chavez packed a football stadium in neighboring Argentina, telling a crowd of 20,000 supporters that Bush's tour was a cynical attempt to divide the region. Thousands of Bolivians, joined by Venezuelan and Cuban aid workers, greeted Chavez at the airport in Trinidad, a city in Bolivia's eastern lowlands where a rainy season has killed 51 people, driven thousands from their homes and triggered an outbreak of dengue fever. Chavez has pledged 15 million US dollars in aid for flood victims, including a squadron of helicopters to deliver food to remote villages, ten times the 1.5 million sent by the U.S. ''Those who want to go directly to hell, they can follow capitalism,'' Chavez told the crowd of some 2.000 Bolivian flood victims and Venezuelan and Cuban aid workers gathered on the steaming airport runway. ''And those of us who want to build heaven here on Earth, we will follow socialism.'' Morales and Chavez were also scheduled to distribute shiny red tractors jointly made by Venezuela and Iran. Since Morales took office a year ago, Chavez has pledged over a billion US dollars for Bolivian petroleum projects, community radio stations and a factory to make tea from coca leaves. In contrast, the Bush administration's 2008 budget proposal slashes U.S. aid to Bolivia by more than 20% from 125 million to 98 million, part of a deep aid cut targeting much of Latin America.