Obama is paying off for Hugo Chavez.

It's starting to look like Hugo Chavez's recent meeting with President Obama really was the diplomatic coup that Chavez claimed. Here's the latest big news from Venezuela:

Venezuelan opposition leader and Maracaibo Mayor Manuel Rosales, who was scheduled to appear in court yesterday on corruption charges, has left the country and is seeking political asylum in Peru.

The mayor is being “politically persecuted,” said his wife, Eveling Rosales, in comments broadcast by CNN’s Spanish- language channel. Manuel Rosales, 56, lost the 2006 presidential election to President Hugo Chavez.

“The fundamental problem is that there’s no credibility in the judicial system, which is a system that’s been completely politicized,” Leopoldo Lopez, a member of Rosales’s Un Nuevo Tiempo party and former mayor of the Caracas borough of Chacao, said in a telephone interview. “This is retaliation and selective repression.”

This looks like a political disaster for the anti-Chavez opposition as well as a direct consequence of his amigo Obama's approbation.