Chavez, a firebrand nationalist who often accuses the U.S. government and domestic opponents of plotting to topple or kill him, and who survived a coup in 2002, said his ministers, the armed forces and his supporters would know what to do if he were ever assassinated.

"We have a plan worked out in the event something happens to me. Those who are thinking about it should know this and that they won't have a good time of it if this happens," he said during his weekly "Hello President" TV and radio show.

Chavez, who was first elected in 1998, did not detail the plan. But he has said before that if he were killed, Venezuela would become ungovernable and its oil shipments to its biggest client, the United States, would be halted.

U.S. officials dismiss his allegations of a U.S. assassination plot as ridiculous. But they often criticize him as a left-wing trouble maker allied to Cuba's communist president, Fidel Castro, a longtime foe of Washington.

Chavez, who won a referendum on his rule last August, said if his enemies did kill him, he did not think they could govern Venezuela. A recent opinion poll put his popularity level at 70.5 percent, a five-year high.

In a message to his supporters on Sunday, he said, "You can't let anyone come and seize our country."

"The revolution should be intensified," he added in a four-hour broadcast in which he criticized the U.S. model of capitalism and expressed his preference for socialism.

Chavez has been spending Venezuela's oil wealth to fund free health and education services for the poor and distribute subsidies and credits for workers' cooperatives he says should be the basis for a new kind of socialism.

His critics say his statist and interventionist economic policies, and systematic persecution of political opponents, are turning Venezuela into a replica of Castro's Cuba.

But Chavez denies this. "The Cuban model can't be copied. We don't want to copy it and we won't," he said Sunday.

© 2005 Reuters