Hugo Chávez draws a crowd in Panama

by Eric Jackson
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Chávez told jokes, sang a song, quoted Walt Whitman poetry and extolled the almost-forgotten heroes of Latin America's anti-colonial liberation struggles. (As in, for example, Francisco Miranda, who raised money in Cuba for George Washington's ragtag band of continental soldiers who fought King George's redcoats, and later in his revolutionary career served as mentor for Chile's liberator Bernardo O'Higgins.)

He criticized media moguls for twisting the minds of children, dogmatists for twisting the social sciences pioneered by Karl Marx, male chauvinists, elitists and people who think that they're well educated when actually they are so historically ignorant as to not know who they are. He had scathing words for capitalist medicine, multinational corporations, the ongoing Central American integration process, free trade deals with the United States, Soviet-style "state socialism" and intellectual laziness.

Chávez was talking past the dignitaries and the chic radicals, reaching out to inspire and inform a radical base. He spoke too long to do it effectively.
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