Rumsfeld says Venezuelan democracy threatened by Sunday's vote

Former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned Sunday that a constitutional referendum in Venezuela threatened to completely destroy the country's democracy and called President Hugo Chavez an "aspiring despot."

"Today the people of Venezuela face a constitutional referendum, which, if passed, could obliterate the few remaining vestiges of Venezuelan democracy," Rumsfeld wrote in an essay published in The Washington Post.

Venezuelan voters were to decide Sunday whether to give Chavez wider powers, including limitless re-election, in a referendum seen as too close to call.

But Rumsfeld said the Venezuelan leader, a close ally of Cuba's Fidel Castro, in fact is trying to dismantle Venezuela's constitution, silence its independent media and confiscate private property.

"Today's global order is threatened not only by violent extremists, rogue regimes, failing states and aspiring despots such as Chavez," the former defense secretary pointed out. "It is also threatened by the complacent assumption that our domestic and global institutions, in their present form, can meet these growing menaces."

Rumsfeld suggested that the best immediate answer to the Chavez challenge would be prompt approval by Congress of a free trade agreement with Colombia, with which the Venezuelan leader has frozen all relations.

"Swift US ratification of the pact would send an unequivocal message to the people of Colombia, the opposition in Venezuela and the wider region that they do not stand alone against Chavez," Rumsfeld wrote.