The MagazineHugo Chávez, Tomb RaiderFrom the ScrapbookAug 9, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 44
The Scrapbook confesses that it takes a certain unhealthy interest in recent accounts of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez’s exhumation of the corpse of Simón Bolivar. No disrespect to the Liberator is intended here, of course; but the details could hardly be invented. Chávez seems to believe that he is the (literal) reincarnation of Bolivar, and is also convinced that Bolivar did not die of tuberculosis in 1830, as is generally understood, but was murdered—probably, in Chávez’s imagination, by Colombia or the United States. To be sure, the fact that Chávez is so attached to the man who won Venezuela’s independence from Spain—he keeps an empty chair at cabinet meetings in case the Liberator should stop by—is a puzzlement in itself. Hugo Chávez seems to have a kind of obsessive hatred for the United States of America and its system of government; Simón Bolivar was not just a friend and admirer of the U.S. presidents of his day, but regarded himself as a Jeffersonian democrat, and carried a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations into battle against the Spanish. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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