Chavez warns visiting foreigners not to criticize

Venezuelan Hugo Chavez said that foreigners who visit Venezuela and criticize his government will be escorted to the airport and expelled.

In a televised address, the Venezuelan leader ordered Cabinet ministers to monitor statements by visitors and deport them if they "denigrated" his leadership.

"How long are we going to allow a person -- from any country in the world -- to come to our own house to say there's a dictatorship here, that the president is a tyrant and nobody does anything about it?" he said.

"No foreigner, whoever he may be, can come here and attack us. Whoever comes, we must remove him from the country. Here is your bag, sir, go," Chavez said.

The threat, made during a six-hour broadcast on Sunday, was one of the strongest warnings to foreign critics since Chavez was elected eight years ago. It came on the eve of the publication of a draft constitution that will propose abolishing presidential term limits, allowing the socialist leader to stand again when his term ends in 2012.

He has recently signaled an acceleration of his self-described revolution by ordering the armed services to reflect socialist values and telling education officials to purge the "perversity of capitalism" from school textbooks.

Opinions the politician, an outspoken opponent of US foreign policy and a key ally of Cuba, are sharply divided at home and abroad. Supporters say he is a democrat who has won three landslides, poured his country's oil wealth into social programs for the poor and restored dignity to Latin America by standing up to Washington. Opinion polls put his approval ratings well above 60 percent.

Critics he is wasting billions on unsustainable populist schemes and eroding democracy by bringing the courts, parliament, the armed services and the state media under his direct control. In May the government refused to renew the terrestrial broadcast licence of RCTV, an opposition-aligned TV station, a move that provoked accusations of censorship.

Chavez he personally did not mind criticism but that in some cases it affronted "national dignity."