"There's nothing unusual about a mayor being trailed by a bodyguard -- unless, that is, he needs to be protected from assassins working on behalf of the president of his own country. But then, Leopoldo Lopez of Caracas is not your usual mayor and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is not your usual president.

"Lopez -- 36, educated at Harvard's Kennedy School of Public Policy, and mayor of Chacao, one of five municipalities within Caracas -- has emerged as one of the most visible challengers to the increasingly authoritarian Chavez regime. That's a dangerous undertaking. Lopez recounts three assassination attempts -- the most recent last year, when 12 shots were fired at his car, six of them killing his bodyguard. ''He died in my arms,'' recalled Lopez, in Chicago this week for a conference of mayors from North, Central and South America.

"Besides the threat of violence like the assassination attempts and the time he was kidnapped for 10 hours by armed thugs, Lopez must fight off the legal power of the state to silence him. One Chavez agency banned him from running in another election until 2017 on bogus charges of financial mismanagement. Other Chavez officials have filed 26 charges accusing Lopez of everything from campaign finance offenses to ''ecocide'' for replanting nine trees to make room for a school. Passage of the constitutional rewrite in a vote later this year, probably Dec. 9, Lopez says, would institutionalize as ''enemies of the socialist state'' those who advocate an alternative to Chavez's authoritarian society.

''We're willing to take that risk,'' says Lopez. While conceding a Chavez victory is probable, he adds, ''It would be a mistake to see this as a now or never thing. The sun will rise after Dec. 9. I'm committed to what I'm doing, to our cause, to the fight for democracy.'"

Gutsy Mayor Takes On Chavez

PS. Contextually unrelated to the above article, I have a horrible suspicion we will be seeing the term "ecocide" being tossed about.