Caracas Chronicles

Quico says: True Venezuelan politics junkies don’t need reminding to check El Chigüire Bipolar on a daily basis. But on the occassion of Chávez’s e/scatological expulsion of US ambassador Patrick Duddy, our prozac-popping rodent friend nailed it so perfectly I just have to give up a link. His take? “Government sets off smoke-screen to cover up the smoke-screen it had set off yesterday.”

“We were weighing up whether we should reveal an imminent yankee invasion via Rio Caribe, have a black out in the East Side of Caracas or announce that Miquilena is an alien who sucks out people’s souls,” said our anonymous source, who took the chance to add what a hard time they’re having coming up with suitably absurd ideas ever since Rodríguez Chacín left the cabinet. “That bugger had it in his blood.”

Insofar as I can add anything to el chigüire’s brilliance here (which, lets face it, isn’t very far), I’d just say this. For all of Chávez’s rhetorical violence, for all his vulgarity and rant-heavy informality over thousands of hours of air time, the guy virtually never swears. Sure, he’s perfected the art of ambling right up to the lexical edge before playfully pulling back (“take your newspapers, roll them up real tight, and shove them in your …pocket!”) but, as far as I can remember, before yesterday, he’d only ever used an out and out tabu word in public once.

Read into that what you will…