In public U.S. officials have shown no signs of remorse for the position they took last Friday after the military forced Chavez out of office and installed new civilian rulers.

The White House said Chavez, a frequent critic of U.S. foreign policy, was responsible for his own fate because he had ordered troops to open fire at unarmed demonstrators.

After Chavez returned to power on Sunday, U.S. officials said they had spoken on Friday on the best information then available, in the belief that Chavez had resigned.

But the experts, who have had private contacts with U.S. officials this week, said the Bush administration now realized their apparent sympathy for the coup was a mistake.

"Given my contacts with people in the administration over the last two days -- they will not say so publicly -- but quite clearly there has been a rethink of the decision last week at the time of the coup," said Riordan Roett, director of the Western Hemisphere program at the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

"I have spoken to several people and they recognize the damage. There is no question about that," said Larry Birns, director of the liberal Council on Hemispheric Affairs.

The New York Times also made an unusual expression of remorse in an editorial, saying that in welcoming the departure of Chavez last week, it had "overlooked the undemocratic manner in which he was removed."

"Forcibly unseating a democratically elected leader, no matter how badly he has performed, is never something to cheer," the editorial said.

LOSING MORAL LEADERSHIP

The administration's handling of the coup attempt has won little support inside the United States, even at a time when the attacks of Sept. 11 continue to give President Bush extra leeway in conducting foreign policy.

Arturo Valenzuela, director of the Center for Latin American Studies and a former Clinton administration official, said: "Unfortunately, the Bush administration did not seem to understand what was at stake in Venezuela.

"The United States now risks losing much of the considerable moral and political leadership it had rightly won over the last decade as the nations of the Americas sought to establish the fundamental principle that the problems of democracy are solved in democracy."

Birns said the Bush administration was the primary loser from the failed coup and had given ammunition to Latin Americans who assume the United States has been behind every coup in their region for decades.

The United States has denied it encouraged those responsible for the coup, although U.S. officials had met opponents of Chavez frequently in recent months.

"People have been coming to us complaining. We told them that we support the democratic process and everything has to be done constitutionally. We didn't so much as wink at them," said a State Department official.

But Roett said the incident reinforced the impression among Latin Americans that Bush does not take them seriously.

"He (Bush) can't get Congress to cooperate on trade promotion authority. ... The FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) appears to be going nowhere.

"A series of issues have begin to raise some questions about the commitment of the administration to the region. This is one more step that will convince people who are skeptical that there isn't much depth to the commitment," he added.

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