"I AM JUST GOING CRAZY about how she's doing it so quickly," Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez reportedly said, as he beamed at a young Russian woman in the provincial city of Izhevsk last week. Chávez, who was on a three-day trip to Russia, did not make this statement while carousing at a local strip club. He was marveling at the IzhMash factory's female production-line workers assembling one of the famous Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles. He had just made a deal to buy 100,000 of them. And that's not all he bought on his Russian shopping spree. There are also fighter aircraft, advanced radars, and other assorted baubles for Vene zuela's air force.

The AK-47, the weapon of choice for armies and insurgent movements around the world, was invented in Izhevsk, about 600 miles east of Moscow. Its designer, Mikhail Kalash nikov, spent most of the first 70-odd years of his life toiling in obscurity--not traveling outside of Russia until the fall of communism, when the export of Russian weapons became big business. Today, at 86, he is treated like a combination rock star/elder statesman at international defense expositions, where he is often seen wearing his Hero of the Soviet Union medals and other decorations. In the last two years, he has even launched his own brand of vodka.

But the success the AK-47's designer has had at promoting his brand has not been mirrored in the sales of his famous rifle. Earlier this year, Vladimir Grodetsky, the CEO of the IzhMash factory, bemoaned the fact that Russia makes only 10 to 12 percent of the sales of the more than one million AK-47s purchased on the world market each year. "The rest are unlicensed copies," he said in a press conference this past April.

Chávez's visit to the factory and the extensive list of agreements he signed the next day at a pomp-and-circumstance-style Kremlin cere mony are all about reversing this trend. Russia makes a number of large weapons systems--fighter aircraft, naval vessels, air defense systems--that it has sold to China and India for billions of dollars, but it has had less success with smaller weapons. More important, it has yet to make a big dent in the Latin American market.

Latin America is one of the last unexplored frontiers in the weapons-export business, as the previous money-making venues in the Pacific Rim and the Middle East have--for the time being--purchased about all they can afford for the next several years. Most of Latin America's air forces operate an odd mix of older model U.S. and French aircraft, many of which date to before the weapons embargoes that were clamped on South American dictatorships in the late 1970s. Some of these aircraft have been modernized by Israeli firms in the years since as a stop-gap, but it is only recently that the new Latin American democracies--unencumbered by those sanctions--have begun to rearm themselves with more modern weaponry.

The Chilean air force took delivery this year of the first of a batch of Lockheed Martin F-16s, and last year Brazil signed an agreement with France to purchase a number of used Dassault Mirage 2000 fighters from the French air force. Previously, Brazil's navy had purchased the Clemenceau-class aircraft carrier Foch from France, since renamed the S o Paulo, and equipped it with a wing of Douglas A-4 Skyhawk carrier aircraft that it acquired used from the Kuwaiti air force.

Russia has had no such luck on this continent. A handful of Russia's most advanced fighter jets, the Mikoyan MiG-29, were sold to Peru in the early 1990s, but these were used aircraft purchased not from Russia but from its neighbor, Belarus.

Chávez's visit and the impressive list of arms deals he signed give the Russians their first big weapons bonanza in Latin America, and enemies of Chávez, in Washington and elsewhere, another big headache. He has already taken delivery of 30,000 of the 100,000 AK-47s. Concern that many of these assault rifles might end up in the hands of Colombian rebels or the drug lord armies in the favelas around Rio de Janeiro is well-founded. But the more serious dangers created by the new Caracas-Moscow axis are longer-term and can be found in the other deals the two have reached.