This week's find is a Frontline classic, The Hugo Chavez Show.
Using an old episode of Frontline might seem like cheating as far as a Netflix find goes, but where Frontline usually serves to both teach me something and convince me everything’s going to hell, the episode called The Hugo Chavez Show (a reference to Aló Presidente, his old weekly program on Venezuelan national television), was really just an incredibly thorough portrait of Chavez and his accomplishments and missteps up to that point in his presidency. The sort-of centerpiece of the documentary, which covers his entire political career to date (the film premiered on Frontline in 2008), is Aló Presidente, because Presidente was such a surreal, cartoonish form of propaganda. Clips of Chavez on the show boasting about his great deeds and openly chastising members of his cabinet are then contrasted against the reality in his country according to journalists, and citizens who both support and oppose, and the result is often staggering (as described by Caracas-based journalist Phil Gunson here). Now that Chavez is gone, The Hugo Chavez Show is especially worth seeing in order to understand both who the man was and what could be in store for Venezuela, Cuba, and, in many ways, the rest of the world.
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