Here in the states, we all had a good laugh when Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez denounced Halloween as part of ‘the U.S. culture of terror.’ He also said that Halloween costumes were terrible efforts to scare people as well as alien to the Venezuelan culture. By the sound of it, you could almost imagine that he actually believed that Halloween’s playful merrymaking with ghosts and goblins was actually real to him.

To U.S.-Americans, Chavez sort of sounded like a stereotypical backwoods Christian fundamentalist preacher. I grew up with such people and remember hearing the exact same exhortions against the ‘celebration of evil’ that Halloween was from them. Sometimes religious people go a little overboard in their efforts to find truth and the best way to handle these episodes is with tolerance, for the fact is, they are trying. A couple of recent examples I can recall include Jerry Falwell denouncing some smurfie beenie baby thing that wore purple and carried a purse, and our own Pope Benedict XIV warning against Harry Potter books as a possible road to error. Even the Vatican seemed to be aware that the boss was sliding off the deep end – a Vatican spokesman hastily clarified that the Vatican was aware that the book was just childish fun and assured laymen that Harry Potter was not headed for the Index of Forbidden Books any time soon.

None of these intentions were anything like what Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez had in mind. He is a purely political creature and his denunciations of Halloween were efforts to strike down his political opponents. Miguel Octavio, in an excellent explanatory essay, points out that Chavez’s Halloween denunciations followed recent skeleton, ghost and pumpkin protests around Caracas, where young kids made up paper skeletons and posted them around the capitol as an orginal means of criticizing the dictatorship. They did the same thing with pumpkins and ghosts after that.

Chavez didn’t take any of this well and ordered the full forces of the secret intelligence security services to investigate and arrest the kids who put up the curious emblems of muffled democratic protest. He also charged them with ‘inciting hatred.’ The Venezuelan dictator intended to show these youngsters something to be really afraid of over ghosts, using true dirty war tactics. The disproportionate response from the government goons against the kids is where the real news is, as Francisco Toro notes in his own excellent essay, and it’s likely to have an impact.

The end result now is that Venezuela has a new symbol of protest defiance. And this symbol from these kids may well likely grow.