Mr. Danger and Sr. Luzardo

Here's an essay in the Boston Review most definitely worth reading if you're interested in Sr. Chávez and perhaps especially if you're not.

The pictures of their opponents painted by politicians are almost always caricatures. This is even more the case when information and knowledge about that opponent is relatively limited. The caricature of Chávez in the US is a Castro-lite buffoon with egomaniacal tendencies. His television show, "Allo Presidente" is putative confirmation. This view is perpetuated by the opposition, who holds control over most of the Venezuelan media and is apparently the preferred source of information about Venezuela in the US.

This view is, of course, a caricature painted for political reasons. The reality is that even some people I have met in the opposition say that Chávez has a great sensitivity to the history of Venezuela, its culture, and its historical exclusions. One opposition member told me somewhat reluctantly that Chávez' televised reading and interpretation of a famous Venezuelan poem once made her cry. "It was perceptive, learned, and beautiful."

Here, Greg Gandin explains Chavez' reference to Bush as "Mr. Danger." Read the rest of the article too.

...Mr. Danger, it turns out, is a minor character in Rómulo Gallegos’s 1929 novel Doña Barbara, a landmark in Venezuelan literature and before the fiction boom of the 1970s one of the most widely read Latin American novels in the world. A “great mass of muscles under red skin, with a pair of very blue eyes,” he is one of many unsympathetic misters who populate 20th-century Latin American social and magical realist prose, beginning in 1904 with the Chilean writer Baldomero Lillo’s abusive mine foreman Mr. Davis and continuing through Mr. Brown, the manager of a U.S. banana company in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

In Doña Barbara, the inhabitants of Venezuela’s untamed southern plains at first welcome the arrival of Mr. Danger, believing that he will bring “new ideas” to help modernize the region’s agricultural production. Their hopes are quickly dashed as the “scornful foreigner” loafs in his hammock, smoking his pipe and living off rustled cattle, stirring only to shoot alligators and ply his neighbor with liquor to steal his property and despoil his daughter. Mr. Danger is a “humorist in his own way” who, when introducing himself, repeats his surname in Spanish— peligro—“to emphasize its disconcerting translation.” It’s a trick Chávez, also easy with a joke, likewise enjoys: “The greatest peligro in the world,” he warns, “is Mr. Danger.” Gallegos himself served as Venezuela’s president for less then a year in 1948 before being ousted in a coup that many Venezuelans insist had the support of Standard Oil and the U.S. embassy. So for the millions reared on the novel Chávez’s own disconcerting translation has special force.

Chávez’s success owes much to his creation of a colloquial cosmopolitan nationalism, his ability to thread into his speeches historical figures such as Simón Bolívar and literary references more obscure than Mr. Danger. As his international stature and aspirations have increased, Chávez has expanded his repertoire. He now moves seamlessly from Simón Bolívar to Jawaharlal Nehru, Bertrand Russell to Noam Chomsky. But Mr. Danger has only a bit part in Doña Barbara, which is concerned less with vanquishing the imperial interloper than with taming Venezuela’s inner demons. The novel follows the progress of Santos Luzardo, beginning with his return from Caracas to his ancestral ranch deep in Venezuela’s mythic llano country. Urbane and lettered, Luzardo at first hopes to sell his inheritance but soon succumbs to the call of the land. Gallegos leaves little to the imagination. Santos Luzardo, a lawyer whose name means Sacred Light, slowly gains the advantage in a war of maneuver with his neighbor, Doña Barbara, an enchantress whose impulsive power over men symbolizes all that the interior of the nation, and thus the nation itself, must overcome if it is to move forward: hierarchy maintained by arbitrary clientalism; profit derived from theft rather than production; and society held together by fear in lieu of law.

For those familiar with Doña Barbara, it might seem odd that Chávez, in invoking Mr. Danger, implicitly identifies with Luzardo, whose struggle to civilize the plains was represented by his installation of a barbed-wire fence around his vast ranch. Chávez, after all, has done more than any of his center-left counterparts who now govern throughout Latin America to weaken the absolute right of private property that has been the cornerstone of the global political economy for more than two decades. He has distributed large, unproductive public lands and private estates to peasant cooperatives, nationalized bankrupted industries, and forced oil multinationals to renegotiate operating contracts. But Chávez easily updates the values that mark Doña Barbara’s barbarism to lambaste “cruel and savage” free-market capitalism. And like Luzardo, who triumphs by putting his enemies’ weapons to his own use, Chávez, a former coup plotter and self-described revolutionary, has bested his opponents at their own electoral game.