From Reuters
By Patrick Markey

Venezuela’s left-wing president, Hugo Chavez, joined U.S. anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan on Sunday to assail President George W. Bush and promised to back her protest against the Iraq war.

Chavez, a self-styled socialist revolutionary and close ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, has become a voice for many anti-U.S. movements as he campaigns against Washington’s free-market policies in South America.

Sheehan, who held a vigil outside Bush’s Texas ranch after her son was killed in Iraq, was in Caracas for the World Social Forum, where activists met to protest U.S. policies and debate ideas from land reform to fair trade and indigenous rights.

“Enough of imperialist aggression. We must tell the world, down with the U.S. empire,” Chavez said hugging Sheehan and the widow of Puerto Rican independence activist Filiberto Ojeda Rios, who was killed in a gunfight with police last year.

“Cindy, we are with you in your fight … she told me that in Easter she’s going put up her tent again in front of the ranch of Mr. Danger,” Chavez said on his Sunday television program in a reference to Bush.

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