Caracas Chronicles

What the hell is wrong with Agencia Bolivariana de Noticias these days?! Normally, if Chavez calls a march and nobody shows up, you expect them to run pictures like this:

See? Taken from a low angle, nicely set up to make the march look bigger than it really was. This is normal: any self-respecting autocratic regime has a propaganda arm designed to crank out images like this.

But then, how did this other picture make it onto their coverage of Saturday’s Chavez-the-Mariachi rally?

I mean, c’mon! They didn’t even crop it off on top and on bottom to make it look like it went farther on either side!

Don’t these ABN types learn anything in those Prensa Latina seminars they send them to in Havana? Frankly, I’m outraged! We send them oil, and they can’t even train our journalists to disinform us properly! Shoddy, shoddy propagandizing, I say…

That picture, along with this next one, strike me as totally amazing.

Jesus! Is this really as many people as they can drum up to march along with Chavez? Not so long ago, this is about how many chavistas would turn up outside Miraflores on any given day just to hand in a papelito asking for a personal favor! What the hell happened?

[Thanks to Daniel for the image tip.]