The United Socialist Party of Venezuela, the result of a cooptation union between the leftist parties of the country, has released a CD with the latest revolutionary hits. President Hugo Chavez is the featured star in one of the songs. [Fox News, PSUV Wesbite]
But Hugo isn’t the first Latin American leader to sing in public to promote his goals. The region has a long history of cheap populists, socialists, and occasional right-wingers who stage these shows to gain popular support. The most famous politician who did this in the 1990s was Abdala Bucaram, former President of Ecuador. Called the “madman,” the Ecuadorian Congress eventually declared him mentally unfit to rule and removed him from office less than a year after his election. He danced, sang, and released his own music CD as capital fled the country and inflation began to wipe out the middle class. Here he is onstage with the Irancudos, an Uruguayan band:
Not to be outdone, Alberto Fujimori, former President of Peru, also released a song. This is a real advertisement from his 2000 campaign:
Note that the commercial calls him the “Chino” (Chinese) even though he is ethnically Japanese. He was popular in the early 1990s in part because he wasn’t perceived as a member of the small, white oligarchy. Fujimori later fled the country to avoid charges of corruption and human rights abuses during his presidency. He became involved in Japanese politics at one point to avoid extradition.
Bucaram and Fujimori met in the mid-1990s to negotiate a peace process between Ecuador and Peru. What people saw on TV that day was an ethnic Japanese and an ethnic Lebanese dressed up in indigenous garbs, complete with alpaca hoods and native ponchos, eating roasted guinea pigs and other local delicacies. This is what Gabriel Garcia Marquez must have envisioned when wrote about magical realism in Latin America.
So Chavez isn’t the first and probably won’t be the last political figure in Latin America to lend his voice and image for the cause, whatever the cause may be at the moment. He has practically been doing it for years on his seven-hour long Sunday talk show. The only noteworthy part is that the PSUV finally put up an mp3 of Chavez singing on their website, which makes us wonder why it took them so long to capitalize socialize on this.
The real question is: when will he sing about Obama? [CNN]