Chávez, Assailed on Many Fronts, Is Riveted by 19th-Century Idol

Datanalisis, a Caracas pollster, now says that fewer than 40 percent of Venezuelans have confidence Chávez can resolve their problems. Another pollster, Alfredo Keller and Partners, said last week that Chávez's popularity had dropped to 38 percent, from 65 percent in 2006.

Luis Vicente León, an analyst and pollster at Datanalisis, said Chávez had lower approval ratings from 2001 to 2003, when they hovered just above 30 percent. But his slide has been precipitous since losing a Dec. 2 referendum that would have given him more powers.

The trend "for him is bad, very bad," Le¿n said. "We've never seen a slide so significant in such a short period."

Chávez's revelations on Bol¿var have astonished students of history from as far away as Europe and the United States. Among other things, he has said that one of Colombia's founding fathers, Francisco José de Paula Santander, was complicit in Bolívar's death.

"Historically, he's got it all wrong. It's quite incorrect," said John Lynch, a professor emeritus at the University of London whose recent "Simón Bolívar: A Life" is considered a definitive autobiography. "The facts have been known for some time, that Bolívar died of natural causes. He was attended by a qualified doctor who wrote bulletins, did an autopsy, and all these things have been aired, published."

Lynch and other historians also take Chávez to task for presenting Bolívar as a social revolutionary who sought to transform the region into an egalitarian paradise countering U.S. power. Undoubtedly a great man, Bol¿var never sought to wipe away the underpinnings of society, nor did he particularly fear the United States or pine for a Latin American nation.

"What does Chávez do? He utilizes him for his own ends, and he interprets him his way," said El¿as Pino, a Venezuelan historian whose book, "The Divine Bolívar," outlines how Latin American leaders have created the cult of Bolívar for political purposes. "So he quotes him perfectly, like a schoolchild. He has a prodigious memory, but the majority of the citations, if not all of them, are out of context."

At the Pantheon on a recent afternoon, several Venezuelans said they thought Chávez should focus his energies on resolving the country's problems.

"How can you disturb the memory of Bol¿var, touch his bones and say that Santander killed Bolívar?" said Ivan Adames, a security guard. "Please! That's something my daughter, who's barely 7, would say is absurd."

Arlington Serrano, 26, noted that the diaries of those who were with Bol¿var in his dying days are proof enough of how the great man died. "Ch¿vez wasn't there at the moment," Serrano said. "If those who were there said he died of illness, then he died of illness."

Chávez, though, is having none of it.

He said that Bolívar was too strong, too fit, to have succumbed to illness in his march to Santa Marta. Lowering his voice for dramatic effect during his speech about Bol¿var, looking at his ministers with a conspiratorial glare, he suggested that oligarchs may even have stolen the Liberator's bones.

"We have the moral obligation to clear this up, to open that sacrosanct coffin," he said. "And then examine the remains that are there. Hopefully they're Bol¿var's. Hopefully."