My usually pro-Chavez colleague tries to tell me that at his outspoken best, President Hugo Chavez Frias is addressing a specific (local, Venezuelan) audience when he makes outlandish statements such as his most recent about international terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (Carlos 'The Jackal') and Uganda's Idi Amin ... it certainly makes one wonder what Chavez seeks to achieve by heaping contentious coals on the fires of an already negative image that he has engendered in the international media.
Yes, there used to be a linguistic isolation of South America, but times have changed. Years ago it might have taken days for Chavez' rasher statements to reach the disbelieving ears of Europeans, North Americans or even those in Asia and elsewhere in the Pacific who give a damn about what's happening along southern Caribbean shores. The time differential and the cost of reporting trivialities were not unsubstantial and lunacies were kind of expected from faraway places.
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Nowadays, though, the internet and the frailties of Google Translate tend to remove the distances if not cultural impediments and misinterpretations.
Yes, Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez is languishing in a French jail for his atrocity, but President Hugo Chavez is quite correct in stating that as far as Venezuelan jurisdiction is concerned, Carlos the Jackal can be seen to be as innocent as the driven snow if he were to be allowed to return to his homeland.
THAT doesn't detract from the blood of three human beings that was spilled in the 1975 attack on OPEC but if we are to consider the fact CIA terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is walking free in Miami after killing seventy-three innocents aboard Cuban airliner 455, just a year later in 1976, we can tot up the body-counts and ask vital questions that still largely remain unanswered...
Why Idi Amin should have been drawn into the equation is anyone's guess. My (admittedly Chavista) colleague had ventured the catch-all that the President was speaking to "a specific audience" ... but with TV lenses and microphones at the ready, does it take any stretch of the imagination to understand that off-the-cuff remarks about Amin's supposed cannibalism would be pounced upon by any reporter who was not submitting him/herself to self-censorship for political if not personal security considerations.
Considering the fact that most if not 99.999% of Venezuelan government officials demand to know a reporter's political allegiances as a preliminary to deigning to cast his or her verbal pearls before media swine, it's more than likely that the presidential faux-pas might have gone unreported ... but the essence is really that, in a curious parallel with urban mythology in the run-up to the Great War (1914-1918), could it really have been true that German men and women had a predilection for eating new-born babies?
Whatever the official explanations, gloss-overs, accusations of out-of-context, government cover-ups and denials etc., etc., Chavez' tendency to say just the wrong thing at precisely the right (wrong?) time to get him the most international exposure, highlights a serious absence of competent presidential advisers who might otherwise have had the foresight to have a kindly whisper in El Comandante's ear before he lets his mouth run away with him.
Not for the first time, we have remarked about the 'looney-toons' at Venezuela's Foreign Ministry and assorted Venezuelan embassies around the world, where it might have been hoped that Nicolas Maduro might have done a better job of guiding foreign policy through the thicket of international intrigues than he did guiding a fully-laden Metrobus through congested Caracas streets.
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