Many people outside Venezuela know about Chávez's narcisism and the personality cult around him. It is still only when they arrive in Venezuela that they start to see how pervasive the regime is promoting that cult. Millions upon millions of dollars are spent not in schools or hospitals but in huge billboards with the image of Chávez. Millions upon millions are spent not in textbooks for children but on countless messages on national TV and radio, in posters in every state office. Below you have the link to a video with Chávez showing Evo Morales his birth place or casa natal. The state channel VTV presents the "event" in a way that is more pathetic than anything you could have have seen during Soviet times. Chávez and his followers do not realise those who really achieved something positive and enduring were not thinking about having their birthplace transformed into some sort of museum.
German writer and polymath Goethe had been dead for many decades before his birthplace was transformed into a museum
It just takes a couple of seconds of following Chávez's behaviour to realise its pathological nature.
Some of the things you can hear in this video:
Some of the things you can hear in this video:
Journalist: "This is historic, there is no precedent...to touch the same ground, the same place, the same infrastructure where the president spent his first years".
Chávez: "Ah, the doors remain the same, they haven't changed them...in rainy time water would get into this room...the kitchen was here, this was my grandmother's room...this is just the same. This house was built by my uncle Marcos and my granny in 1961...we were children, we were walking...this was guerrilla area...we knew there were guerrillas...that is why the gringos put that military base...we heard about Fidel, Cuba...and the years passed and what happened? Fidel came!...And now Evo. Long live Evo!".
"My mother wanted me to be a girl and when they saw I had what we have they said: it is another boy...so as my mother wanted to call me Eva, as a girl, the doctor and my grandmother told her: then call him Evo"
"My mother wanted me to be a girl and when they saw I had what we have they said: it is another boy...so as my mother wanted to call me Eva, as a girl, the doctor and my grandmother told her: then call him Evo"
Chávez: "Here I fell down when my bike broke" (mind: this is all on national TV).
Mob: "We love Chávez, we love Chávez".
Chávez: "A wasp stang me here"..."I don't understand why they keep this garden without trees, I don't get further into this as we are live"..."we had mango trees, orange trees, pineapples, advocados, chirimolla trees" "Who committed that crime?" (felled all the trees)
Chávez's brother Adan, governor of Barinas, has a body language that shows he feels annoyed because the president keeps asking about the trees.
Venezuelans don't have a huge statue of their living president as Turkmeni did (actually still have) with Niyazov. No month is named after Chávez's mother, unlike in Turkmenistan. Other that that, there is almost difference between the cult of personality in Venezuela and the Central Asian country. Both countries are full of gas and oil and the vast majority of people living there have little real education.
Chávez taken oath to his ministers in early 2007
