Versión Español
Canada’s National Post noted this past week that telenovelas are the latest culprit for out-of-control crime in Venezuela. Forget poverty, corruption, economic uncertainty, incompetent police, and prisons run by criminals; the “anti-values” of soap operas are just too much.
In his state of the union speech last week, Maduro took aim at a popular soap opera, De todas maneras Rosa, produced by Venevision.
He accused the nation’s biggest broadcaster of profiting from violence by celebrating the crimes of one of the melodrama’s lead characters, Andreina Vallejo, a psychopathic former beauty queen who fatally poisons her own mother to hide the paternity of her son.
Gripping. Fortunately, Victoria Henderson was on hand — a PanAm Post columnist and the managing director of the Institute for Social and Economic Analysis. Her response letter appeared in the January 24 edition of the newspaper:
If that [argument] sounds familiar, it’s because Hollywood director Oliver Stone recently said the same thing, claiming “fantasy violence” is “infecting the American culture.”
Mr. Stone has played a key role in polishing the image of Latin American despots whose special brand of social engineering is amenable to the highbrow set, since it shifts the blame from Venezuela’s socialist economy, as the cause of the violence. The moral of the story? When you have no soap, you are left with the opera.
