Ambassador Oliver Stone? Sean Penn? Hugo Chávez offers up his wish list.
Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, in the midst of a tiff with Washington, suggests US ambassadors he would accept: Oliver Stone, Sean Penn, Noam Chomsky, even Bill Clinton.
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez speaks during a rally after the opening session in Caracas January 5.
Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters
Washington
Surely Hugo Chávez doesn’t really hold out hope that President Obama would allow a foreign leader to dictate who the US sends as ambassador to his country.
But just in case, the feisty Venezuelan president – who caused a diplomatic row by refusing Mr. Obama’s first choice for Washington’s new ambassador to Caracas – has a personal short list for the job. Mr. Chávez says he’d take director Oliver Stone, actor Sean Penn, linguist and philosopher (and longtime critic of US foreign policy in Latin America) Noam Chomsky, or – why not? – Bill Clinton.
Chávez offered his suggestions in a televised speech Tuesday, amid a diplomatic tit-for-tat that saw the Obama administration revoke the visa of Venezuela’s ambassador to Washington last week in retaliation for Chávez’s earlier rejection of Larry Palmer, a career diplomat, as US ambassador to Caracas.
RELATED: Hugo Chávez heads to 2011 with power to rule by decree
Mr. Palmer had been critical of the Chávez government in his Senate confirmation testimony, suggesting there was low morale in the Venezuelan military and hinting at Venezuelan meddling in next-door-neighbor Colombia on behalf of leftist guerrillas.
Chávez – a leftist-populist whose authoritarian tendencies and cozying up to world leaders like Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have won him no points in Washington – suggested that Obama had a deep pool of potential candidates to chose from who would also be to his liking. “We have a lot of friends there” in the US, he said in his speech.
Chávez’s suggestion of Bill Clinton may have popped into his head as a result of his brief but cordial meet-and-greet with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton Saturday at the inauguration of Brazil’s new president, Dilma Rousseff.
Chávez, who has made long and folksy “conversations with the people” a trademark of his 12 years in power, also revealed in his speech that his “very bad English” led him to inquire of Secretary Clinton, “How is your wife?”
That, and not the sparring over an ambassadorship, would seem to explain the hearty laughter the two shared in Brasilia.
RELATED: Hugo Chávez heads to 2011 with power to rule by decree