For Whom the Pots Clang.(protests against Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez)(Brief Article)

It wasn't the reaction that Hugo Chavez was used to. Only a year ago the Venezuelan president paraded through Caracas slums like Woodrow Wilson on the Champs-Elysees. His roaring triumphs in five elections left no doubt that "the people" were firmly behind him, and he crowned his "Bolivarian Revolution" with a radical new Constitution that sat atop the nation like a celestial diadem. Chavez was a Wilsonian messiah who achieved a Nixonian dream: in a democracy, something close to absolute power.

Imagine, then, his shock when he recently found himself playing a new role, that of the repudiated tyrant. In a poor Caracas neighborhood, the conqueror was greeted not with roses but with bitter protest--a sign that the loathing he inspires in the middle and upper classes had dangerously percolated into even the indigent areas that had once invested such hopes in his revolution. It was not just the protesters' dissent but the way they expressed it that must have spooked the president: Venezuelan housewives loudly banging pots and pans, cacerolas, as he walked by. Long a form of protest, the cacerolazo had been revived by protesters in Argentina, who, armed only with kitchen utensils, forced out dithering President Fernando de la Rua last month. Now the cacerolas announced Venezuelans, too, were sick of empty promises: Chavez's goose was cooked.

The next day the venerable daily El Nacional published a brief report on the event. In response, Chavez, never renowned for his delicacy, orchestrated a "spontaneous" protest outside the newspaper's offices. Government employees and party loyalists besieged the building for four hours--shouting insults at workers, throwing stones and rushing the doors--before the police managed to break it up. The assault garnered swift condemnation from, among others, the Roman Catholic Church, the mayor of Caracas and the U.S. State Department. Chavez was characteristically uncowed, claiming he was proud of the demonstrators and condemning the police--one of the few major institutions out of his direct control--for intervening.

The irony of Chavez's attacks on the press is that he is a creature of the media--even by Clintonian standards. He was utterly unknown when, on Feb. 4, 1992, he ...