“I don’t want to harm relations with Spain, but we don’t like to be pointed at and bite our tongue. Venezuela and its head of state must be respected,” Chavez told a news conference.
At the Ibero-American summit in Santiago, Chile, Chavez on Friday branded Spain’s former prime minister Jose Maria Aznar a ‘fascist’ for allegedly having backed a 2002 coup attempt against him.
Current Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, 47, called on Chavez to show more respect, but the next day the Venezuelan leader repeated the attack, prompting an irate King Juan Carlos to step in and demand of Chavez: “Why don’t you just shut up?”
Chavez, 53, on Tuesday lambasted the monarch, saying he personified Spain’s former centuries-long colonial rule in Latin America.
“Irate? The king was lucky I didn’t hear him ... it’s been more than 500 years of arrogance.”
The Venezuelan president also criticized Zapatero for defending Aznar and demanding that he be shown respect as a former elected prime minister of Spain (1996-2000).
 “Hitler was elected by the Germans, does that mean that nobody can attack Hitler? That’s so absurd, and that’s the absurdity Zapatero came up with,” Chavez said.