posted here so I don’t forget them:

Greg Grandin explains why Hugo Chavez calls Bush “Mr. Danger”: it’s a reference to Rómulo Gallegos’s 1929 novel Doña Barbara, evidently the most famous Venezualan novel. Chavez’s epithet has been repeatedly trotted out as evidence of his craziness – why has nobody in the press bothered to talk to an educated Venezualan, who would presumably recognize the reference? One wonders if all reporting about South America is so elementarily flawed.