Señor Peligro

Greg Grandin explains in The Rebel and Mr. Danger: Is Bush's nightmare Venezuela's salvation? Boston Review May/June 2006 that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez refers to George W. Bush as "Mr. Danger". And he explains the symbolism:

Mr. Danger, it turns out, is a minor character in Rómulo Gallegos's 1929 novel Doña Barbara, a landmark in Venezuelan literature and before the fiction boom of the 1970s one of the most widely read Latin American novels in the world. A "great mass of muscles under red skin, with a pair of very blue eyes," he is one of many unsympathetic misters who populate 20th-century Latin American social and magical realist prose ...

In Doña Barbara, the inhabitants of Venezuela's untamed southern plains at first welcome the arrival of Mr. Danger, believing that he will bring "new ideas" to help modernize the region's agricultural production. Their hopes are quickly dashed as the "scornful foreigner" loafs in his hammock, smoking his pipe and living off rustled cattle, stirring only to shoot alligators and ply his neighbor with liquor to steal his property and despoil his daughter. Mr. Danger is a "humorist in his own way" who, when introducing himself, repeats his surname in Spanish - peligro - "to emphasize its disconcerting translation." It's a trick Chávez, also easy with a joke, likewise enjoys: "The greatest peligro in the world," he warns, "is Mr. Danger." Gallegos himself served as Venezuela's president for less then a year in 1948 before being ousted in a coup that many Venezuelans insist had the support of Standard Oil and the U.S. embassy. So for the millions reared on the novel Chávez's own disconcerting translation has special force.

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