“Zelaya said that in the coming hours he’ll enter Honduras. We’re behind him, we have to support him,” Mr Chávez said in Bolivia on Friday. There has been no confirmation from Mr Zelaya, who is in Nicaragua. In recent days Venezuela’s president, who had already assumed a leading role in condemning the coup, has ramped up his rhetoric against the de facto government in Honduras, accusing it of being backed by the US government.

“The Honduran army wouldn’t have gone forward without the approval of the state department. I don’t think they told [US president Barack] Obama, but there’s an empire behind Obama,” Mr Chávez said on Thursday. Like Venezuela and every other country in the region, the US government has openly criticised Mr Zelaya’s overthrow.

The de facto government in Honduras has responded to Mr Chávez’s “threats, provocations and violation of [its] sovereignty” by formally complaining to the United Nations Security Council. But according to the Honduran ambassador to the UN, who remains loyal to Mr Zelaya, the complaint will be ignored as it does not formally recognise the new administration.

Once the leader of an unsuccessful military coup in 1992 and himself briefly overthrown in 2002, Mr Chávez threatened military intervention shortly after the coup took place, and also provided an aircraft for Mr Zelaya’s botched attempt to return to Honduras two weeks ago.

Telesur, the Venezuela-based regional news channel, has played a key role in reporting events in Honduras from a largely pro-Zelaya perspective, and Roberto Micheletti, the de facto president of Honduras, even accuses Mr Chávez of sending agitators to stir up unrest. A crew of Telesur reporters fled Honduras after being briefly detained by armed guards who advised them to leave.

Mr Chávez, who has embraced Mr Zelaya as the newest member of his leftwing regional alliance Alab, which includes Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua, makes no secret of his contempt for Mr Micheletti. “Al Capone is just a child compared to ‘Gorileti’ and his bandits,” he said, flippantly using his preferred nickname for Mr Micheletti, in reference to the Spanish slang for a military “coupster” or dictator.

Mr Chávez argues that if Mr Zelaya is not returned to power, a dangerous precedent will be set – most of all in countries with leftwing governments. “Next they’ll come for Evo [Morales, Bolivia’s president], then they’ll come for [Rafael] Correa [of Ecuador], then [Fernando] Lugo [of Paraguay], then Chávez.”

“The cruel and beastly hand of the yankee empire, trying not only to overturn democracy in Honduras, will next come for all of us who are trying, together with the people, to implement processes of democratic change,” he added.

Despite the US government’s condemnation of the coup, Mr Chávez’s accusations have been backed by Mr Morales and Fidel Castro of Cuba, who published a column saying: “The idea that the US ambassador in Tegucigalpa, Hugo Llorens, did not know about the coup is absolutely false.”