Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is known to have expressed little patience for imported leisure pursuits like golf or Scotch whisky tippling. Now he has reserved some ire for another practice that is beloved in Venezuela: breast augmentation surgery.
Chavez said on state television over the weekend that blame for the boom in such surgeries here rested with doctors who “convince some women that if they don’t have some big bosoms, they should feel bad.” He said it was a “monstrous thing” that poor women were seeking breast lifts when they had trouble making ends meet.
“What is this, friend?” Chavez exclaimed to his viewers.
Chavez’s comments come at a time when Venezuela has emerged as one of the world’s leading markets for breast augmentation. Between 30,000 and 40,000 women here undergo the procedure each year, according to estimates by the Venezuelan Society of Plastic Surgeons.
Billboards in Caracas advertise bank loans for the surgery. Gossip blogs speculate on the enhancements done to contestants in the Miss Venezuela pageant. Last year, one candidate for the Venezuelan National Assembly, Gustavo Rojas, tried to finance his campaign by raffling off a breast lift (he lost anyway).
“I’ve never seen more silicone anywhere else,” Mireia Sallares, a filmmaker from Spain who focuses on feminist issues and is working on a project about Venezuela, told the newspaper Tal Cual.
While Chavez lamented the amount of money spent on cosmetic breast surgery, there is also a darker side to the procedures, with reports of surgical mistakes resulting in the deaths of some patients. One 20-year-old woman, Paola Rios, died in Caracas this month because of complications from breast augmentation surgery.
Chavez’s stand on such a fixture in Venezuelan popular culture prompted swift reactions from some quarters, notably the medical profession.
“I don’t think there should be any type of discrimination against these aesthetic procedures,” said Ramon Zapata Sirvent, a leading plastic surgeon here.
In an acerbic editorial on the subject on Monday, the opposition newspaper El Nacional compared Chavez to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, who regards Chavez as a friend.
“Now comes this antiquated, militaristic, coarse, repressive attitude on the freedom of women to do what they want with their bodies,” El Nacional said.
The president, however, made it clear that breast augmentation did not square well with his revolutionary priorities. He said that among the thousands of letters he receives from supporters, one arrived asking for his help for a breast lift.
“I think this breast operation costs between US$4,600 to US$7,000,” he said. “Of course I had to reject it.”
State media outlets agreed with the president on the subject. The state newspaper Correo del Orinoco contended this month that plastic surgery was “as common as dentist appointments and it is not unusual for wealthy parents to proudly buy their 15-year-old daughters breast implants for ‘coming of age’ birthday presents.”
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion