The death of Hugo Chavez has certainly divided cartoonists, as Chavez divided observers during his lifetime. Here, Lalo Alcaraz suggests that Chavez's identity may stem from the prism through which he is being observed.
A large number of cartoonists who have commented on his death picked up on his UN speech, which he began with a joke about following his nemesis, George W Bush, by 24 hours. Chavez claimed that the devil had spoken there and he could still smell the sulfur.
Tacky, tacky, tacky.
Not as tacky as funding opposition to a freely elected government, but pretty damned tacky, not to mention ballsy.
Not as ballsy as recognizing a government in 48 hours between the success of an anti-Chavez coup and that coup's reversal by street demonstrations and a larger corps of military officers. Or was that tacky? Whatever.
In any case, his demise launched a thousand cartoons riffing off his impudent speech and showing him arriving in Hell and meeting the real devil who, as it turns out, looks nothing at all like George W Bush.
Take that, ya commie bastard!
Kevin Kallaugher provides a more reasoned anti-Chavez view:
If a man is known by the company he keeps, Chavez's legacy will be tarnished by the unsavoury lot with whom he hung out.
That's the way of the world: Anastasio Somoza, Rafael Trujillo, Juan Peron, Augusto Pinochet, Ferdnand Marcos and the Shah of Iran are also remembered for their associations. Aren't we all?
A couple of those right-wing darlings are said to have inspired the remark, "He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch." As it turns out, none of them did, or maybe all of them, or maybe nobody ever actually said it at all.
In any case, Hugo Chavez was most definitely not our son-of-a-bitch, and discussions of whether we "drove him into the arms" of these other folks may be giving the CIA and others too much credit. Still, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," and we certainly set ourselves up as Chavez's enemy, or, at least, as the friends of his enemies.
Helping finance opposition tends to do that. The National Endowment for Democracy may not be entirely run by spooks, but it's not surprising if others see it that way.
And I'll admit that I peer through my own prism: It's as frustrating for me to see strong suggestions that Ahmadinejad represents the views and wishes of the majority of Iranians as it is to see claims that Chavez did not represent those of the Venezuelan people.
It seems transparent that, if you want to make war against Iran, you downplay the size of the substantial popular opposition to the mullahs, while, if you want to de-nationalize the oil fields of Venezuela, it helps to declare that the people of Venezuela are hoping someone will come take their oil revenues back before they piss it all away on housing, food, education and medical care.
Was Chavez a man of the people?
International observers repeatedly declared his elections to be fair, despite the naysayers who insist he was corrupt and that the Carter Center only certified those elections in error, or as part of a vast leftwing conspiracy.
And the buzzards began circling a few weeks ago: As he lay dying, there was a quick burst of anti-Chavez flakkery in this country, persuasive enough that Brian Williams took a break from his breathless coverage of YouTube videos to report on it:
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What I find interesting in this clip is that (A) as Williams himself admits, this wasn't news: We've seen these ads for quite awhile out East, and (B) while the oil company exec decries the fact that Kennedy was getting aid for the poor from Citgo, he doesn't even vaguely suggest that maybe other, more flag-waving, eagle-loving, noncommunist oil companies might have dulled the impact of Chavez's generosity by chipping in a few pints themselves.
That's as telling as anything else in the Chavez story: In the current world, apparently helping people in order to get them to like you is cheating.
This reminds me of when, during the Chicago Seven Trial, Judge Hoffman refused to allow former Attorney General Ramsay Clark to testify for the defense because it might tend to prejudice the jury in favor of the defendants.
As Abbie Hoffman said, I thought that was the point of a defense.
In any case, as Clay Bennett observes, Chavez will be mourned.
Y'know. For the most part.
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