Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Tuesday said Spain's King Juan Carlos showed a streak of "arrogance" when he told him to "shut up" during a presidential summit last week, as both governments strove to put the spat behind them.
"I don't want to harm relations with Spain, but we don't like to be pointed at and bite our tongue. Venezuela and its head of state must be respected," Chavez told a news conference.
At the Ibero-American summit in Santiago, Chile, Chavez on Friday branded Spain's former prime minister Jose Maria Aznar a "fascist" for allegedly having backed a 2002 coup attempt against him in Venezuela.
PHOTO: EPA
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, 47, called on Chavez to show more respect, but the next day the Venezuelan leader repeated the attack, prompting an irate Juan Carlos to step in and demand of Chavez: "Why don't you just shut up?"
Chavez, 53, on Tuesday lambasted the monarch, saying he personified Spain's former centuries-long colonial rule in Latin America.
"Irate? The king was lucky I didn't hear him ... it's been more than 500 years of arrogance," Chavez said.
He also criticized Zapatero for defending Aznar and demanding that he be shown respect as a former elected prime minister.
"Hitler was elected by the Germans, does that mean that nobody can attack Hitler? That's so absurd, and that's the absurdity Zapatero came up with," Chavez said.
Aznar, 54, said on Tuesday that Chavez had attacked him merely to draw attention away from Venezuela's internal problems.
"I'm old enough to know some people need foreign enemies when things start going wrong back home ... Therefore, I'm not going to fan all that nonsense and lies. I will simply ignore them," said Aznar on Colombian television without mentioning Chavez by name.
Chavez meanwhile portrayed himself as the victim in the incident.
"Now they're saying I was the one who attacked the king. For the love of God, I didn't even see the king," Chavez said.
And he tried to explain the king's rebuke as a result of fatigue.
"I think the day before he had a long and intense workday," adding that he may have got tired "of hearing things, not only from me, but from Evo [Bolivian President Evo Morales] and Daniel [Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega] and other revolutionary comrades," Chavez said.
"The king blew up hearing all these things," Chavez said referring to the leftist rhetoric he, Morales and Ortega are becoming known for in Latin America.
"When he said `why don't you just shut up,' he was telling it to other people: `Why don't you all just shut up,'" Chavez said.
In Spain, Zapatero said on Tuesday that Juan Carlos, 69, had given a "spontaneous" reaction to Chavez' remarks on Saturday, and expressed hope that relations with Caracas would recover.
"Spain has given an appropriate response to an inappropriate attitude," he remarked to reporters.
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
RSS