Hugo Chavez, the cokehead?

“It all,” as the orphanage nuns used to tell us children, “comes out in the wash.” Venezuela’s big-talking President Hugo Chavez has revealed that he regularly consumes coca—the source of cocaine. In other words, save for the palace, the trappings and the fawning celebrities, Hugo Chavez seems to be just your average cokehead. Kudos to savvy El Nuevo Herald reporter Casto Ocando for revealing one explanation where Chavez gets his bully personality. It’s enough to restore your faith in the Mainstream Media.

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“Chavez’s comments on coca initially went almost unnoticed, coming amid a four-hour speech to the National Assembly during which he made international headlines by calling on other countries to stop branding two leftist Colombian guerilla groups as terrorists and instead recognize them as “armies”. Si! It would a take guy high on some wacky tabacky to try to ever arrange that. “I chew coca every day in the morning…and look how I am,” he is seen saying on a video of the speech, as he shows his biceps to the audience.” These biceps would fail little man Chavez miserably should he ever run into a group of Colombian housewives on their way to the market. Chavez will never be welcome in Colombia so long as he doesn’t stop treating it as if he owns it. But Chavez may have done a favour to all the cokeheads that saw the video, who will be thinking, “Gawd, am I going to get fat like him if I don’t drop the blow?” This mouth that walks includes among his personal friends, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President Nicolas Sarkozy and Fidel Castro. Don’t think they’re on the same stuff. Are they? Well, Chavez smells sulphur, which he says, comes from George W., and Ahmadinejad sees the colour green whenever he’s at the United Nations. Chavez has been kissed by model Naomi Campbell, Cindy Sheehan, etc., etc. While they may have been photographed kissing Chavez, the former paratrooper who shows up in Colombia wearing his duds of yore, has never been photographed planting copious kisses on the butt of his favourite mentor, Fidel Castro. According to Ocando, “Chavez, who does not drink alcohol, added that just as Fidel Castro “sends me Coppelia ice cream and a lot of other things that regularly reach me from Havana,” Bolivian President Evo Morales “sends me coca paste…”I recommend it to you.” “It was not clear what Chavez meant. Indigenous Bolivians and Peruvians can legally chew coca leaves as a mild stimulant and to kill hunger. But coca paste is a semi-refined product-between leaves and cocaine—considered highly addictive and often smoked as basuco or pitillo. “It is another symptom that (Chavez) has totally lost the concept of limits,” said Anibal Romero, a political scientist with the Caracas Metropolitan University. “It shows Chavez is a man out of control.” “If he is affirming that he consumes coca paste, he is admitting that he is consuming a substance that is illegal in Bolivia as well as Venezuela,” said Hernan Maldonado, a Bolivan analyst living in Miami. “Plus, it’s an accusation that Evo Morales is a narco-trafficker” for sending him the paste.” Cocaine addiction could also explain why Chavez was prancing about like a banty rooster in a red paratrooper tam over the Christmas holidays in Colombia. And it would also explain why Chavez insists to have kidnappers-of--the-innocent, murdering FARQ delisted from the world’s terrorist list. Cocaine trade has increasingly come under the control of FARC. “Venezuela has long been a transit route for cocaine manufactured in neighboring Colombia, the world’s No 1 producer of the illegal white powder that ends up in the United States and Europe. (Reuters, Jan. 19, 2008). “But U.S. officials say Venezuela’s role in the cocaine trade has expanded to make it a major drug shipment route.” “I think it is about time to face up to the fact that President Chavez is becoming a major facilitator of the transit of cocaine to Europe and other parts of this hemisphere,” says John Walters, director of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy. Now we know why Chavez doesn’t want FARC types branded as the terrorists they are. FARC members are, after all, employees of the President of Venezuela.