Critics say Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is a cheat, insidiously skirting the spirit if not the letter of the law to impose his will on the country.

BY FRANCES ROBLES

CARACAS -- To opponents of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, their head of state is a sneak who skirts the rule of law to defeat his enemies and impose his will.

Consider: After two judges freed several protesters arrested last week during street demonstrations against Chávez, the judges lost their jobs.

When a Venezuelan court ruled last year that Cuban doctors helping the poor here lacked the required accreditations, Chávez disbanded the court and kept the Cubans.

And when the pro-Chávez majority in the legislature wanted to ram through a controversial bill changing the debating rules in Congress, the National Assembly convened in a park in an unfriendly pro-Chávez neighborhood -- where the opposition dared not go.

So when the National Elections Council last week cited a technicality to set aside more than one million signatures on petitions seeking to recall Chávez, critics said it was just the latest of a long string of actions that illustrate the real problem with the president -- he cheats.

The populist leader has marked his presidency with a series of rulings, decrees, rhetoric and maneuvers that bent the rules of the game to his advantage -- but mostly managed to avoid openly breaking them.

2-YEAR POLITICAL CRISIS

The allegations form the basis for the two-year political crisis, in which an alliance of political, labor and business groups seeks to oust a man they say is every day less democratic and more like Cuban President Fidel Castro.

''People think democracy just means elections,'' said Eduardo Graterol, attending an anti-Chávez demonstration last Monday as others burned tires and trash. ``Our institutions are kidnapped. When you close off all democratic paths, people react.''

''We broke with him because he was taking a path that wasn't democratic,'' said Congressman Rafael Simón Jiménez, who parted ways with Chávez six months ago. ``He is accelerating his control over government institutions, and we could not accept it.''

The government's response: a drive for a recall referendum against Jiménez.

Chávez and his supporters point out that the former army lieutenant colonel was elected fair and square. Twice. And they note that the Venezuelan opposition is hardly one to talk about democracy.

A military rebellion embraced by the opposition briefly ousted Chávez on April 11, 2002. In the single day that his replacement led the nation, he disbanded Congress and scrapped parts of the Constitution. Chávez advocates in Congress were arrested and the government TV station was shut down.

''The opposition does not believe in a democratic exit for Chávez,'' said Ismael García, one of the president's most vocal advocates in the National Assembly. ``Chávez uses the Constitution and laws the ways they are written. He has to respect them. He is the chief of state.''

Asked how the government justifies a proposal to add 12 supreme court justices -- to be named by the legislature -- to the now politically divided 20-member court, García replied that before Chávez, the ruling parties chose magistrates in dark, smoky rooms.

''This country is totally and absolutely democratic,'' Vice President José Vicente Rangel said.

But critics point to last week's decision by the Elections Council, whose ruling board is made up of two opposition members, two Chávez supporters and president Francisco Carrasquero, who was initially perceived as a moderate chavista but is now regarded as a solid supporter.

SIGNATURES SET ASIDE

After lengthy delays and controversy, the council set aside more than one million signatures, the majority on a technicality disputed by observers from the Organization of American States and the Atlanta-based Carter Center.

Chávez opponents angrily asserted the decision showed the president influenced the electoral council to block the recall vote. His supporters say that if he really controlled the council, it would have voided the signatures outright and not have given petition signers a second chance to verify their set-aside signatures.

RULE IS `ILLEGITIMATE'

''We are dealing with an illegitimate government,'' said Miguel Díaz, an analyst with the Center for Strategic International Studies. ``Can you imagine if U.S. Democrats met in southeast Washington to keep white Republicans from voting? Those are the street-gutter politics this government has been playing.''

The challenge now, Díaz said, is for the international community, particularly Washington, to figure out how to handle democratically elected leaders who become undemocratic.

Chávez's legal shortcuts were no secret to Venezuelan voters. He led a failed military coup in 1992 and after his first election in 1998 called for a constitutional convention that his supporters dominated and produced a document almost tailor-made to his leftist populist ideology.

The new Constitution also allowed the president and his allies to put their backers in charge of independent powers like the Supreme Court and the prosecutor's office. After the 2002 coup attempt, he also dismissed dozens of senior officers and replaced them with loyalists.

''We're living in a military democracy in a state of siege,'' opposition legislator Julio Borges said.

Herald special correspondent Phil Gunson contributed to this report.