UNITED NATIONS – A U.N. agency is in the middle of an escalating war of words between Washington and Caracas after awarding President Chavez of Venezuela its $5,000 Jose Marti prize, bestowed in Havana by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

The prize, given by the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and, according to its Web site, intended to promote the heritage and values of Latin America, has been obscured from the public eye for more than a decade. As Friday’s awards ceremony became an occasion for spreading anti-American sentiment, the Marti prize, and Unesco’s choice of Mr. Chavez as its recipient, angered politicians in Washington and diplomats at Turtle Bay.

Messrs. Castro and Chavez seized the occasion to criticize the government in Washington, taking advantage of the prestige of the United Nations and Unesco, which, like Turtle Bay itself, draws 22% of its annual $305 million budget from American funds.

“They will forever try to preserve the U.S. empire by all means, while we will do everything possible to shred it,” Mr. Chavez said during a 2 1/2 hour long speech before 200,000 people gathered at Havana’s Revolution Plaza, with Mr. Castro by his side, according to the Associated Press.

“We don’t believe that Chavez represents the ideals embodied by this prize,” the spokesman for the American mission to the United Nations, Richard Grenell, told The New York Sun.

“It is astonishing and beyond the pale that a man such as Chavez, who poses a very real threat to democracy, not only in Venezuela, but in the entire region, and has engaged in virulent anti-American attacks, was honored by Unesco,” Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican of Florida who has been active in her state’s anti-Communist Cuban emigre community, said in a statement.

Recent Latin American elections have signaled an anti-Washington trend in the region, alarming members of the Bush administration. Bolivia recently elected a populist anti-American president, Evo Morales, and in Mexico, where presidential elections are scheduled for July 2, a similarly inclined Manuel Lopez Obrador is leading in the polls.

“We’ve seen some populist leadership appealing to masses of people in those countries,” Defense Secretary Rumsfeld told the National Press Club last week, saying the trend is “worrisome.” Mr. Chavez “was elected legally – just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally – and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others,” Mr. Rumsfeld said.

“Populist leaders are those who concern themselves with their people, with health, with education,” Mr. Castro told the Havana crowd. “More dangerous are those who possess dozens of thousands of nuclear weapons.”

Separately, Venezuela’s vice president, Jose Vicente Rangel called President Bush “the North American Hitler,” and compared his administration to the Third Reich.

A Venezuelan diplomat, Jeny Figueredo, was cheered in Caracas yesterday as she returned from Washington. She was expelled by the Department of State in retaliation for Venezuela’s expulsion of an American naval attache on charges of spying by Mr. Chavez. “We don’t like to get into tit-for-tat games, but we felt compelled to respond to Venezuela’s action,” a State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack said yesterday, adding that no further action is planned against Venezuelan diplomats.

Both Unesco and American sources said the $5,000 prize money included no American funds. The Marti prize was established in 1994 by the executive board of Unesco during a period in which the U.N. organ was so heavily politicized that America withdrew all financial support from it. Mr. Castro chose to name the award after the 19th-century hero of Cuba’s war against Spain, who has become a symbol of Communist Cuba. Many institutions there bear Marti’s name, including Havana’s international airport.

The prize was created “to promote and reward an activity of outstanding merit that, in accordance with the ideals and spirit of Jose Marti and embodying a nation’s aspiration to sovereignty and its struggle for liberty, contributes, in any region of the world, to the unity and the integration of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and to the preservation of their identities, cultural traditions, and historical values,” according to Unesco’s Web site.

Although it is supposed to be given every two years, according to the rules posted on the site, the prize has been awarded only three times between 1995 and 2003. Mr. Chavez was chosen by a seven-member jury from South Africa, France, Benin, and Cuba. The only American representative on the board, University of Illinois professor emeritus Ivan Sculman, did not return phone calls or e-mail messages seeking comment yesterday.

Of the 10 nominations received by the jury, six proposed Mr. Chavez for the award, and all jury members agreed to award him the prize, according to Unesco officials, who yesterday attempted to distance the organization’s leadership from the award and Mr. Chavez, stressing the jury’s independence.

No director general has ever rejected a jury pick, Unesco’s spokeswoman in New York, Suzanne Bilello, told the Sun, and the policy of the current chief, Koichiro Matsuura of Japan, is “not to change recommendations of independent juries, which are often the subject of attention from member states.”