April 15 (Bloomberg) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez named a head for the country’s newly created Capital District, weakening the opposition leader who was elected mayor of Caracas last year and advancing his drive to centralize power.

Chavez’s appointment of Jacqueline Faria, the current chief executive of the state mobile phone company and vice president of Chavez’s party, removes the city’s most populous borough from Mayor Antonio Ledezma’s jurisdiction. Faria’s post of Chief of the Capital District was created by the Chavez-controlled National Assembly on April 7.

“This is making a mockery of the sovereign will of the people of Caracas,” Ledezma said today in comments broadcast by the Globovision network after notice of Faria’s appointment appeared in the Official Gazette. “It represents a violation of the constitution.”

Since Chavez’s party lost key states and cities in November elections, the president has intensified his offensive against the opposition through the courts, the legislature and executive decrees. Chavez said last week it was necessary to set up a federal district under presidential control to make Caracas “a democratic municipality.”

‘New Actors’

“Since the November elections, there’s new actors on the political scene,” said Milos Alcalay, Venezuela’s former ambassador to the United Nations. Chavez is “intending to cut off any kind of alternative power.”

Outside Caracas, the National Assembly has stripped state governments of power to run ports and airports, authority that could be used to build political muscle against Chavez.

The government has also targeted opposition leaders for prosecution. Manuel Rosales, who was elected mayor of Venezuela’s second-biggest city in November, went into hiding after the attorney general charged him with “illegal enrichment.” Rosales, who ran against Chavez in the 2006 presidential election, says he’s unlikely to get a fair trial.

“He’s using Rosales as a kind of symbol for the offensive he launched against all of the opposition,” said Teodoro Petkoff, a former planning minister who now edits the opposition newspaper Tal Cual. “This is about political revenge.”

‘Autocratic Regime’

Rosales, who is scheduled to appear in court April 20, said in a letter e-mailed yesterday to the press that Chavez is running a “totalitarian and autocratic regime,” according to El Universal.

The crackdown hasn’t stopped at Rosales. Raul Baduel, Chavez’s former defense minister who turned on the president in 2007, was detained by military intelligence officers this month. He is still being held.

Even after winning a constitutional amendment to abolish term limits in February, Chavez faces a growing threat from the opposition’s slow but steady rise in popularity. In November, opposition leaders won governor’s seats in the country’s three biggest states and mayor’s offices in Caracas and Maracaibo.

Information and Communications Minister Jesse Chacon said the legal actions aren’t politically timed, and that opposition leaders are using accusations of political persecution as their defense.

“The number of people in the opposition is significant. Not even 1 percent of them are being brought before any legal proceeding,” he said April 3 in a news conference. “The case against Rosales didn’t start now. It’s been ongoing since 2007, and has to do with illegal enrichment. The Baduel case has to do with how funds were managed when he was defense minister. Each one must respond.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Matthew Walter in Caracas at mwalter4@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: April 15, 2009 17:07 EDT