Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is on a moral crusade, preaching against everything from alcohol to luxury cars, vowing to curb whisky imports and ordering beer trucks off the street. His government announced increased taxes on alcohol and tobacco on Monday, and Chavez also plans steep new taxes on luxury items such as fancy cars and artwork.
It's all part of Chavez's efforts to encourage Venezuelans to adopt the psyche of the "New Man," a socialist revolutionary with a monk-like purity of purpose. Chavez often cites the life of Cuba's iconic hero Ernesto "Che" Guevara as an ideal example and complains that many Venezuelans' values are not up to par.
"We're one of the countries that consumes the most whisky per capita in the world. We should be ashamed," Chavez said recently on national television. "I'm not willing to continue offering dollars to import whisky in these quantities. What kind of revolution is this? The Whisky Revolution? The Hummer Revolution? No, this is a real revolution!"
Sales of both premium whisky and Hummers are booming, however, and a good number of Venezuelans are unapologetic about it. It won't be easy for Chavez to persuade his people to shed their shopping-mall materialism and hard-drinking ways.
"If I drink my bottle of whisky it's because I worked for it. I made the sacrifice and therefore I can drink whatever I want," said shopkeeper Ernesto Gonzalez, 49, who gawked at Hummers and luxury cars at an auto show in Caracas where people sipped draft beer and pina coladas on the showroom floor.
Chavez, however, has other plans. On Monday, tax agency chief Jose Vielma Mora said the government is tightening restrictions on granting dollars to companies importing liquor, especially whisky. That will force many companies to buy black-market dollars -- currently trading at more than twice the official rate, to import Chivas Regal for instance, raising the price considerably.
The government also plans tax increases next week of up to 50 percent on a range of alcoholic beverages, while cigarette taxes will rise to 70 percent from 52 percent.
Chavez is also concerned that too many Venezuelans swill beer on street corners. Irked by unregulated beer sales in the slums, he has warned that beer trucks selling alcohol directly on the streets would be seized.
Anyone wanting to booze up can do so in the privacy of their own homes, he said.
"I've told the National Guard to stop and seize any truck going around selling beer in the street as if it were ice cream," he said.
The president has a long list of other "New Man" recommendations: don't douse foods with too much hot sauce, exercise regularly, eat healthy and respect speed limits.
He also wants parents to stop buying Barbies -- and breast enlargements -- for their daughters.
"Now some say: `When my daughter turns 15 years old, we're going to give her phony breasts.' What a horrible thing! It's the latest degeneration," Chavez told one packed auditorium.
All of his sermonizing about vices and virtues might make Chavez seem like a prudish sourpuss to some, but he also likes to party -- in his own clean way.
He says he unwinds with pickup baseball games or outdoor bowling matches known as "bolas criollas." And during marathon speeches he breaks into song frequently -- so often, in fact, that one aide compiled recordings of him singing on an "All Time Hits" CD, which has yet to be released.
"There I am singing, but it's terrible," Chavez said.
Andres Medina, a 39-year-old browsing at the car show, said he agrees with Chavez, but that old habits die hard.
"Society would benefit from socialist values," he said. "But it's very difficult to change this culture."
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to