In my car, today, I was listening to an analyst putting forth a hypothesis that my friend Rafael Azzi had already posed to me a couple of months ago. I'm not sure he had read it somewhere else, but anyway. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela had always been fire-tongued and combative, but now he attacked Angela Merkel, saying that she was a daughter of Nazism. I think that requires no comment. Chávez has already ill-spoken about other chiefs of State such as Uribe, Lula and Bush. His altercation with King Juan Carlos of Spain became notorious and even generated ringtones for mobile phones with the king's "por que no te callas" ["why don't you shut up?"]
Chávez's, with his gratuitous fights with "adversaries", would only be trying to enhance his nationalistic image, in order to regain the margin of popularity he lost. The Venezuelan president started his government with 70-75% approval ratings, and now (with lack of basic products on shelves, high inflation, the closing of a popular TV channel, discussions on corruption in his government, etc.) it has gone down to 51%. This is a very good approval rate still; Chávez has produces vast improvements in Venezuela's social indexes, but it seems that his mojo is starting to dry.
Come November, Venezuela is going to face state and municipal elections. Currently, twenty-two of the twenty-four states of Venezuela are controlled by the chavismo, and Chávez still has a vast majority of seats in the Congress, but his ultra-mega-tantalizing package of constitutional proposals has been democratically declined by the population. November will test his political vigor.
But the thing is: wasn't there a better way to do it than constantly threatening war with Colombia, cursing Brazilian biofuels, saying Angela Merkel is a bloody nazi and calling Bush a "pajarito" (whatever that is)? Chávez is running the risk of contracting a serious boy-who-cried-wolf infection:
"Venezuela threatened Colombia with war"
"Who said that"
"Chávez"
"Ha!"
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