IN CHAVEZ'S CROSSHAIRS?

Fidel Castro is not far from death.

That's one conclusion to draw from his failure to get out of bed for
the summit of the non-aligned nations held in Havana last week.

The other telling sign that the long-winded tyrant is not coming
back, despite Cuban claims that he is on the mend, was Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez's performance at the United Nations on
Wednesday. Clearly the revolutionary baton has been passed to the
kook from Caracas, Castro's wealthiest and keenest protege.

After this week, Americans are likely to be focused on the nexus
between Venezuela and Iran, whose president rivaled Mr. Chavez as the
scariest speaker at the General Assembly. Yet there is an equally
pressing threat from Venezuela right in the U.S. backyard.

The battleground is Bolivia, which Mr. Chavez badly wants to control
so he can seize that country's natural-gas reserves and become the
sole energy supplier in the Southern Cone. In doing so, he hopes to
seriously damage the Brazilian economy and crush Brazil's
geopolitical ambitions as the leader in South America. In its place
he wants to plant the flag of Venezuelan hegemony.

If he gets away with it, Argentine and Chilean sovereignty would also
be diminished and continental stability lost.

To avoid this grim outcome and preserve Bolivian democracy, the U.S.
could start by studying Mr. Chavez's path to power, which included
help, both passive and active, from Washington.

Theatrics aside, the Venezuelan's verbal assault this week against
the U.S. was hardly a news flash.

Mr. Chavez has been spouting this stuff for eight years while
Venezuelan democrats have been begging the world to take note of it.
Democratic Congressman William Delahunt, former Republican
Congressman Jack Kemp and the Washington law firm of Patton Boggs all
worked to give Mr. Chavez an image makeover in the U.S. so that
Venezuelan cries for help might be ignored even as the aspiring
dictator was consolidating power. It seems to have worked too. Let's
not forget what happened when Venezuelans tried to remove Mr. Chavez
in a 2004 recall referendum. The European Union refused to act as an
observer, citing lack of transparency. But that didn't stop Jimmy
Carter or the Organization of American States, both of which went
along to "observe" a vote cloaked in state secrets.

When OAS mission director Fernando Jaramillo cried foul at the many
government pre-referendum pranks and Mr. Chavez complained about him,
OAS chief Cesar Gaviria yanked Mr. Jaramillo from the country just
ahead of the vote. Exit polls showed that the Venezuelan president
was badly beaten in the contest but the chavista-stacked electoral
council declared him the winner. Mr. Chavez refused to allow
independent auditing of voting machine software or a count of paper
ballots against machine tallies.

Mr. Carter together with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for the
Western Hemisphere Roger Noriega and the OAS, rushed to endorse the
vote despite the lack of transparency and many testimonies to
state-sponsored intimidation and dirty tricks. In the heat of the
battle, the National Endowment for Democracy cruelly threatened the
country's most important independent electoral watchdog that if it
didn't accept Mr. Chavez's victory, NED would pull its support. Mr.
Chavez now boasts that he was democratically elected and foments
hatred against his neighbors, including the U.S. Wednesday's
Castro-esque message claimed that the "non-aligned" movement intent
on going nuclear has only pure motives, while the U.S. president is
the devil. Still Hugo knows that rhetorical bullying from the U.N.
pulpit can take him only so far. Both Mexico and Peru rejected Chavez
proxies this year in presidential elections.

While he might still get a foothold in Nicaragua if Daniel Ortega
wins there in November, what he really wants to do is knock Brazil
down a few notches.

And there is no better way to do that than to hit its energy supply.

This explains the blitz the chavistas are now putting on in Bolivia
to make that country a (hydro) carbon copy of Venezuela. Mr. Morales
rose to executive power by first using violence to bring down two
constitutional presidents and then forcing a new election, which he
won. He dreams of an indigenous, collectivist Bolivian economy under
the thumb of an authoritarian government. Never mind that most native
Bolivians are highly entrepreneurial.

His power is boosted by his support for Bolivian coca growers against
U.S.-mandated eradication efforts.

He is also being coached by Mr. Chavez. He has nationalized
investments in the natural-gas industry and he ruled that
agricultural land be redistributed to peasants.

He has purged the military of its highest ranking professionals and
he has arrested or threatened to arrest some 150 of his political opponents.

Bolivia is now blanketed with Cuban doctors and teachers.

Cuban security detail protect the president while Venezuelan energy
advisers are said to be setting policy in the natural-gas sector.

Yet there is serious resistance in the eastern states and some
admission from La Paz that the country is too poor to cut itself off
from the world. Last week Mr. Morales had to fire his energy minister
after Brazil threatened to exit the country when the minister
announced the seizure of two more Brazilian owned refineries.

Such acquiescence toward Brazil has to be frustrating Mr. Chavez and
any chance to defeat those in his way now lies with the rewriting of
the Bolivian constitution. But there is a problem there too. Mr.
Morales's party has just over 50% of the constitutional assembly seats.

That means that in order to steamroll the opposition the government
must force a change in the approval requirement to a simple majority
from a two-thirds vote, which is now the law.

Seven of the nine state governors have objected to this but Evo's
side is again threatening violence.

Bolivia could use some help from the international community.

One thing the U.S. could do to weaken Evo is end insistence on coca
eradication, which while failing to reduce drug use has alienated peasants.

What is clear is that doing nothing while Mr. Chavez seizes power on
the continent is not an option.