VENEZUELA: Hugo Chavez' big mouth! Woops ... he's gone and done it again!

My usually pro-Chavez colleague tries to tell me that at his outspoken best, President Hugo Chavez Frias is addressing a specific (local, Venezuelan) audience when he makes outlandish statements such as his most recent about international terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (Carlos 'The Jackal') and Uganda's Idi Amin ... it certainly makes one wonder what Chavez seeks to achieve by heaping contentious coals on the fires of an already negative image that he has engendered in the international media.

Yes, there used to be a linguistic isolation of South America, but times have changed. Years ago it might have taken days for Chavez' rasher statements to reach the disbelieving ears of Europeans, North Americans or even those in Asia and elsewhere in the Pacific who give a damn about what's happening along southern Caribbean shores. The time differential and the cost of reporting trivialities were not unsubstantial and lunacies were kind of expected from faraway places.

• Nowadays, though, the internet and the frailties of Google Translate tend to remove the distances if not cultural impediments and misinterpretations.

Yes, Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez is languishing in a French jail for his atrocity, but President Hugo Chavez is quite correct in stating that as far as Venezuelan jurisdiction is concerned, Carlos the Jackal can be seen to be as innocent as the driven snow if he were to be allowed to return to his homeland.

THAT doesn't detract from the blood of three human beings that was spilled in the 1975 attack on OPEC but if we are to consider the fact CIA terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is walking free in Miami after killing seventy-three innocents aboard Cuban airliner 455, just a year later in 1976, we can tot up the body-counts and ask vital questions that still largely remain unanswered...

Why Idi Amin should have been drawn into the equation is anyone's guess. My (admittedly Chavista) colleague had ventured the catch-all that the President was speaking to "a specific audience" ... but with TV lenses and microphones at the ready, does it take any stretch of the imagination to understand that off-the-cuff remarks about Amin's supposed cannibalism would be pounced upon by any reporter who was not submitting him/herself to self-censorship for political if not personal security considerations.

Considering the fact that most if not 99.999% of Venezuelan government officials demand to know a reporter's political allegiances as a preliminary to deigning to cast his or her verbal pearls before media swine, it's more than likely that the presidential faux-pas might have gone unreported ... but the essence is really that, in a curious parallel with urban mythology in the run-up to the Great War (1914-1918), could it really have been true that German men and women had a predilection for eating new-born babies?

Whatever the official explanations, gloss-overs, accusations of out-of-context, government cover-ups and denials etc., etc., Chavez' tendency to say just the wrong thing at precisely the right (wrong?) time to get him the most international exposure, highlights a serious absence of competent presidential advisers who might otherwise have had the foresight to have a kindly whisper in El Comandante's ear before he lets his mouth run away with him.

Not for the first time, we have remarked about the 'looney-toons' at Venezuela's Foreign Ministry and assorted Venezuelan embassies around the world, where it might have been hoped that Nicolas Maduro might have done a better job of guiding foreign policy through the thicket of international intrigues than he did guiding a fully-laden Metrobus through congested Caracas streets.

We have no record of any traffic pile-ups in bus driver Maduro's wake, but the Foreign Ministry's trajectory in recent years has been in gridlock with increasingly toxic fumes coloring the Casa Amarilla an even fouler shade of mustard.

Trained diplomatic professionals' chances of gainful purpose at MRE are about as unrealistic as a 'non-Maduro/Flores dynasty' applicant's chances of getting on the National Assembly's family payroll. It's not unrealistic to observe the prevalence of a 1990s urban guerrilla fraternity in the hallowed halls of both institutions (?) with the fear of imminent personal extinction the controlling factor in a mafia that's about as far removed from people-power democracy as you can possibly get this side of the galaxy.

When, as often is the case, he's NOT talking about Carlos the Jackal and Idi Amin, Chavez talks of the urgent necessity to combat corruption ... but his efforts in that direction appear to be just as fruitless as a career opportunity at MRE or the AN conditioned on the acquiescence of fraternal corruption and contempt for Venezuela/Venezuelans as a whole.

What the future will bring for Venezuela/Venezuelans is anyone's guess at this juncture. Security threats (real or imagined) continue without stay, and the United States' McCarthyistic psych-ops war fuelled by their paranoia for modern socialism (with all its faults in implementation) is their own disgrace.

It continues to amaze simple observers like myself why a strategist such as Hugo Chavez Frias, himself, should fail to recognize that he must tackle the well-funded and professional disinformers at their own media game. It's all very well to pay $$$s for international movie celebrities to make corporate appearances at the Miraflores Presidential Palace while, with one side of its mouth, the US State Department complains that Venezuela isn't doing enough to control the flow of cocaine from Colombia to ready consumers on the streets of the United States at the same time condemning Venezuela for taking remedial action.

Where, indeed, was the Venezuelan PR team -- any PR team with sufficient media savvy -- to tell the world the true facts when the Venezuelan Army blew up a couple of ramshackle border bridges over which Colombian drug-traffickers had plied their trade.

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