BY TIM JOHNSON

 CARACAS -- A flood of corruption charges and recriminations has deepened rifts
 within the populist coalition of President Hugo Chavez and confronted the populist
 leader with the greatest political crisis he has faced since coming to office a year
 ago.

 The charges swirling around the president's Fifth Republic Movement come from
 former military comrades who have held some of the most sensitive and powerful
 positions in the government. The charges include nepotism, pilfering of slush
 funds, influence-peddling and a stifling of internal democracy.

 The sudden disclosure of the accusations is part of the jockeying for power that
 accompanies the approaching ``mega-elections'' May 28. Nearly every elected
 position in Venezuela will be up for grabs.

 So far, Chavez has not been been implicated directly, but analysts say the
 turmoil underscores friction between civilians and former military officers within the
 Chavez government.

 Three former army officers who helped Chavez launch an unsuccessful 1992
 military coup have turned against his movement, and a legal cloud has fallen over
 his civilian mentor, Luis Miquilena, a skillful octogenarian politician who oversaw
 the assembly that rewrote the nation's constitution last fall.

 ``No one could have imagined a year ago when the government of Hugo Chavez
 was catapulted to power by national disgust over corruption . . . that we'd be
 witnessing this spectacle," said Teodoro Petkoff, a former newspaper editor and
 vocal critic of Chavez. ``The president now has a very hot potato in his hands.''

 ANNIVERSARY CRISIS

 In a nearly two-hour address to the nation Friday night, Chavez said he was
 ``pained'' by the charges but promised that any wrongdoing would be uncovered,
 ``no matter who is implicated.  . . . I will hinder absolutely nothing.''

 The crisis began Feb. 4, exactly eight years after Chavez and a handful of
 renegade officers launched their uprising.

 While Chavez spoke on that day to a throng of followers, three former comrades
 in arms held a simultaneous event in the western city of Coro to accuse his
 government of falling victim to political patronage, betraying its ideals and allowing
 the kind of corruption that fueled the revolt in 1992.

 The three, all former army lieutenant colonels like Chavez, had been among the
 most respected members of the Fifth Republic Movement. They included Joel
 Acosta Chirinos, who until recently was the head of the Fifth Republic Movement;
 Jesus Urdaneta Hernandez, whom Chavez entrusted with running the secret
 police; and Francisco Arias Cardenas, governor of the western state of Zulia.

 ``We were cheated, and this is a grave disappointment to the nation,'' Arias
 Cardenas said, adding that some of Chavez's civilian aides ``appear to have
 turned into criminals.''

 CORRUPTION CLAIMS

 On Thursday, Urdaneta showed up at the national prosecutor's office carrying
 documents outlining what he said were 46 allegations of corruption. Among the
 charges:

 A prominent financier of Chavez's movement, Tobias Carrero, has won contracts
 with 11 different state entities.

 Miquilena, Chavez's civilian mentor, was once a shareholder in a printing
 company, Micabu, that won a noncompetitive contract from the National Electoral
 Council to print Venezuela's new constitution. The charge was first publicized this
 week in El Nuevo Herald.

 Aides to Chavez halted a raid last July of a Fifth Republic Movement installation
 that contained a weapons cache of 16 pistols and 30 rifles.

 Civilian aides to Chavez fired back, claiming Urdaneta is building an
 eight-bedroom, four-level chalet in the exclusive Altos del Halcon district of
 Caracas, apparently with slush funds taken before Chavez removed him last
 month as head of the secret police agency known as the Directorate of
 Intelligence and Prevention.

 Joining in the counterattack, Foreign Minister Jose Vicente Rangel said Urdaneta
 pressured him to hire two relatives at two consulates abroad.

 SOLD HIS SHARES

 Miquilena offered reporters documents Friday that indicated he had sold off his
 shares in the printing company 10 months before it won the state printing
 contract. Miquilena lambasted Urdaneta for living beyond the $1,000 or so a
 month he earned in his post.

 ``His lifestyle doesn't correspond to the salary he was earning,'' Miquilena said.

 The vast majority of Venezuela's 23 million people view Chavez as the nation's
 only real hope to end corruption embedded in the state bureaucracy. But
 supporters of Chavez in the powerful Constitutional Assembly last fall eliminated
 civilian oversight of the military, which serves as a pillar of the Chavez
 government, and fired political independents from key watchdog posts.

 Before his firing in early January, Comptroller Eduardo Roche Lander issued a
 scathing report that said military public works projects had become a source of
 ``deplorable'' corruption.

 Another factor underlying the current feud is criticism from within the ruling
 movement that it lacks internal democracy.

 The three key defectors say they have been blacklisted for upcoming elections
 despite widespread popularity.

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald