"Very poorly done, very bad," pronounced Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro at a public event on Friday. Maduro doesn't think "La Isla Presidencial" ("The Presidential Island"), a cartoon show which made him the butt of a great deal of its jokes about South American political leaders, hit the mark. "It isn't my face, nor my moustache, nor my voice," said Maduro. "[The characters] are out of shape and plus, they make me very ignorant. I'm not ignorant like that, or fat. They call me the fat one [in the series]." But by then, the show had already gone viral, delighting creators Oswaldo Graziani and Juan Andrés Ravell, who say despite the Venezuelan president's apparent aesthetic concerns, they think he took it pretty well.
"It's really taken off," a smiling Graziani told AFP. "It's really having a lot of success on the web, we weren't expecting it to. Maduro himself reacted to it, and by the way pretty well. It's a caricature based on what one sees. He has been a president who gives material to comedians to work with." Graziani and Ravell say their show, which has become popular in the Spanish-speaking world, was inspired by the series "Lost". But unlike the latter, "La Isla Presidencial" skewers Maduro and some of his Latin American peers at the presidency -- but Maduro, by most measures, gets it worst. The creators paint the Venezuelan president as perhaps the dumbest of the crew, and other caricatured dignitaries spend a long moment comparing him to a more rotund version of Borat and Freddy Mercury. They also mock the Venezuelan president's frequent recourse to certain words and expressions.
"On the presidential island they make fun of me because I say that word a lot," Maduro said. "Qué bonito, qué bonito, qué hermoso" - how nice, how nice, how beautiful. That in itself is part of a sendup of Maduro's claim, during his presidential campaign, that his deceased predecessor Hugo Chavez had come to him in the form of a "little bird" and told Maduro that he should lead Venezuela. Chavez is revered among much of his political base as something akin to a folk saint, with improvised shrines popping up around the country in neighborhoods where he was most beloved. "I felt his spirit," Maduro said in a televised speech broadcast at the time. "I felt him there as though he were giving us a blessing, saying to us 'Today the battle begins.'"
"How pretty it sings. That bird tried -- well, it's trying -- to tell you all something," says the caricature of Maduro when a bird lands on a nearby branch. "How nice, how beautiful, how beautiful, how nice."
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