Caracas Chronicles

Teodoro Petkoff is on fire in his TalCual Editorial today, dealing with the El Nacional morgue photo controversy. Long story short, after Telesur chief Andrés Izarra got a bizarre case of the giggles during a CNN debate on crime, El Nacional ran this shocking, decidedly Not-Safe-for-Work (or, anywhere, really) morgue photo all across its front page…prompting the regime to launch an investigation into the crimes it might have committed by publishing out of turn.

Reprinting the photo in Solidarity, TalCual pounces:

Turns out the problem is the picture. The problem isn’t the 16,000 murders each year, 95% of which are never punished; the problem isn’t the 400-someodd murders in prison, the problem isn’t the thousands of stolen vehicles or the hundreds of burgled apartments at the hands of criminal gangs; the problem isn’t the thousands of express kidnappings, or the longer ones, that take place each year; neither is it the racketeering that guerrilla and paramilitary bands engage in near the border let alone the innumerable snatch-and-runs, which don’t even get reported anymore they’ve become so banal. That’s not the problem. The photo is the thing. 

Read it all (in Spanish).

And bear in mind, in reprinting that photo in the current climate, Petkoff is taking an honest to goodness risk. It’s a noble gesture. We’ll hope it doesn’t turn into the pretext needed to shut him down.