I first met Hugo Ch\u00e1vez in New York City in September 2006, just after his infamous appearance on the floor of the UN General Assembly, where he called George W. Bush the devil. \u201cYesterday, the devil came here,\u201d he said, \u201cRight here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of.\u201d He then made the sign of the cross, kissed his hand, winked at his audience and looked to the sky. It was vintage Ch\u00e1vez, an outrageous remark leavened with just the right touch of detail (the lingering sulfur!) to make it something more than bombast, cutting through soporific nostrums of diplomatese and drawing fire away from Iran, which was in the crosshairs at that meeting.<\/p>\n
The press of course went into high dudgeon, and not just for the obvious reason that it\u2019s one thing for opponents in the Middle East to call the US the Great Satan and another thing for the president of a Latin American country to personally single out its president as Beelzebub, on US soil no less.<\/p>\n
I think what really rankled was that Ch\u00e1vez was claiming a privilege that had long belonged to the US, that is, the right to paint its adversaries not as rational actors but as existential evil. Latin American populists, from Argentina\u2019s Juan Per\u00f3n to, most recently, Ch\u00e1vez, have long served as characters in a story the US tells about itself, reaffirming the maturity of its electorate and the moderation of its political culture. There are at most eleven political prisoners in Venezuela, and that\u2019s taking the opposition\u2019s broad definition of the term, which includes individuals who worked to overthrow the government in 2002, and yet it is not just the right in this country who regularly compared Ch\u00e1vez to the worst mass murderers and dictators in history. New Yorker critic Alex Ross, in an essay published a few years back celebrating the wunderkind Venezuelan conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel, fretted about enjoying the fruits of Venezuela\u2019s much lauded government-funded system of music training: \u201cStalin, too, was a great believer in music for the people.\u201d<\/p>\n