"Thank you, President Bush", one of the speakers told a packed auditorium at the state oil company. "You've given us a reason to get back out on the streets."
Three days later, as many as a quarter of million Venezuelans marched the length of Caracas in defence of national sovereignty. It was the first big mobilization of its kind since Hugo Chavez' decisive referendum victory last August.
From the poor neighbourhood of Petare, past the Colombian consulate to the presidential palace Miraflores, the banners were directed as much against Washington as against the government in Bogota.
The immediate reason for the protest was the December 13 kidnapping of Rodrigo Granda, also known as Ricardo Gonzalez, a member of the International Commission of the Colombian FARC, from outside a café in the centre of Caracas.
The Colombian government has admitted paying rogue Venezuelan military personnel to help carry out the operation.
It is almost certain that Colombian intelligence officers also took part. However President Chavez was merely reflecting the general sentiment of the protestors when he told them:
"This was not planned in Bogota. It is part of a North American strategy to block moves towards greater unity in South America."
Earlier in the week he had told workers from Venepal - a bankrupt paper factory that the state had just announced it was taking over and putting under workers' control - that "they're upset in Washington because we want to free ourselves from capitalism, just as they were upset with Simon Bolivar's new ideas all those years ago".
Together these three moments indicate some of the dilemmas facing the revolutionary process in Venezuela.
The tribute to George Bush may have been a joke, but it grasped an important point. Chavez himself, with his newfound taste for Trotsky, has Chavez says the aim
is to go beyond capitalism, to create "a social economy". Who knows what will happen in the future, he told the November meeting, but for the moment it would be
madness for the revolution to try to
introduce
communism. also referred to it: for the revolution to go forwards, it needs the backlash of counterrevolution. For the last few months, that backlash has been lacking.
Following the failed coup of April 2002, the failed oil industry lock-out at the end of that year and the failed recall referendum, the US administration seemed to have run out of options.
The opposition inside Venezuela was divided and demoralised. Chavez supporters swept the board in October's local ending up with 20 out of 22 state governments and around 80 percent of the town hall administrations.
But the high rate of abstention - around 55 per cent -was a warning sign.
In November, the entire leadership of the movement met behind closed doors to draw up a plan to deal with this new situation.
Chavez himself has variously called it "the new phase of the revolution", "the revolution within the revolution", and the "leap forward".
Ten strategic objectives were identified, including:
1) moving towards a new social structure;
2) building a new kind of democracy;
3) developing a new economic system;
4) continuing to push for a multi-polar world.
The first and third obviously go together. They are already partly expressed in the 40,000 or more co-operatives that have been formed in the last few years, pushing a model of endogenous or selfsufficient development, and the slogan "the only way of combating poverty is to give more power to the poor".
Chavez says the aim is to go beyond capitalism, to create "a social economy". Who knows what will happen in the future, he told the November meeting, but for the moment it would be madness for the revolution to try to introduce communism.
The second objective includes a new emphasis on participatory budgets. The November meeting devoted a whole session to the Brazilian experience in Porto Alegre.
The fourth objective has also taken on some more radical aspects. Chavez increasingly stresses that Bolivar's dream of real integration in Latin America cannot come from presidential summits, but must be built by the social movements from the bottom up.
And in December he told an international gathering of intellectuals in Caracas that there were lessons to be learnt from Trotsky's debate with Stalin. Personally he didn't believe there were any solutions on the national level.
Arguably, this is as much as any revolutionary leadership could sensibly advocate in Venezuela today.
However, there is still some distance between the aims and the reality - a distance aggravated by the absence of any solid, nationally organised, social movements or political parties.
And that makes the rhythms of popular mobilisation more dependent than ever on the backlash of reaction. • In a future article we will examine in more detail the forms of popular participation being developed in Venezuela and the problems these encounter.