Chavez's Parallel Universe

Chavez's Parallel Universe
Forbes.com staff 06.04.06, 2:30 PM ET

New York -

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez likes to create parallel universes.
Where there are institutions he sees opposed to him, from the domestic
media to international trade agreements, he just ignores them and
creates his own version. Case in point: When Chavez took a dislike to
U.S.-led free-trade pacts in the region, he launched his own.

Now the South American leader who most loves to annoy Washington is
making an end run round Hollywood. Chavez is using $11 million of his
government's oil wealth to fund the Film Villa Foundation, a studio
complex on the outskirts of Caracas that will produce films to curb the
cultural influence of the U.S. in Latin America.

Sitting in a director's chair--where else?--to open the new studios this
weekend, Chavez criticized the influence of the "dictatorship" of
America's movie-making giants. He has accused Hollywood in the past of
typecasting Latin Americans as violent criminals and drug traffickers.

He now instructs the region's children to shun capitalism-spreading
characters like Superman, and will be offering a superhero of his own as
an alternative. One of the first projects Film Villa is taking on is a
series of films about Francisco de Miranda, a Caracas-born general in
the Spanish army and a hero of Chavez's who campaigned (unsuccessfully)
in the 18th century for the country's independence from its colonial
ruler, Spain.

Miranda, who is reputed to have had an affair with Russia's Catherine
the Great, fought on the side of the Americans during its war of
independence from Britain--all of which promise some interesting plot
lines. His vision for the liberation of the Spanish and Portuguese
colonies in the Americas was a single empire stretching from the
Mississippi River to Cape Horn, perhaps the ultimate parallel universe
for Chavez.

This is not the Venezuelan president's first foray into the world of
popular culture and mass media. Venezuela is the largest investor in
Telesur, a Latin American TV network launched last year to provide the
parallel universe to U.S. networks such as Time Warner's CNN. Cuba is
another Telesur investor.

At the time of Telesur's launch, Chavez's communications minister,
Andres Izarra, described the channel as "erupting onto the international
scene" to counter cultural imperialism. Even if California's move
mogul's aren't yet quaking in their Gucci loafers over the arrival of
Film Villa, Chavez's government has shown that it has at least got the
Hollywood hyperbole down pat.

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