Last Friday evening, as I was preparing to leave the COPA office, I ran into a gaggle of girls talking excitedly and exchanging cell-phone information. One of them grabbed my arm:
¨Noah. Come with us. We´re going to see Hugo Chavez.¨
¨What?¨
¨He´s speaking at the Estadio Ferrocarrile in Barrio Caballito, and we´d feel safer if there was a guy.¨
¨If you think one nearsighted gringo will protect you from 50.000 riled Argentines, be my guest.¨
¨I said it´d ake us feel safer, boludo. Just come, you´ll never get this chance again.¨
So I went. The stadium was packed to the rafters, though a few police cars outside and scaffolding around the stage were the only apparent nods to security.
I never actually saw Chavez, but you could hear him from three blocks away. His speech was...different from any speech I can remember a politician givig. Maybe because it was a two-houre speech and I only stayed for the first half hour, but it seemed to lack any coherent structure such as a beggining, middle or end (or at least a beggining and middle). The most common themes were Bush-bashing and Latin American unity. Viz:
¨Bush doesnt smell like sulphur anymore. He smells like a political corpse.¨
And
¨The Northern Cowboy says we´re all sons of Washington and Bolivar. I know I´m a son of Bolivar, but he´s a son of a bitch!¨
And
¨They want ´íntegration´, but I call for union!¨
And
¨They want our oil, our water, our land. Over my dead body.¨
The Bush-bashing is fairly obvious; it´s a crowd-pleaser almost everywhere, especially if you happen to really hate the guy as Chavez does.
The union stuff, though, was the dream of Chavez´s hero, Simon Bolivar, who unsuccessfully sought to unite South America into one world power, rather like Nasser tried to do in the Middle East. Chavez hasalready spoken of Nasser admiringly, and he hardly ever stops talking about Bolivar. We´ll see.
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