Mercenaries 2: World in Flames??????? is an explosive open-world action game set in a massive, highly reactive, war-torn world. A power-hungry tyrant messes with Venezuela’s oil supply, sparking an invasion that turns the country into a warzone???????”

With a hat tip to Venezuela Today this new video game, showing a major street in Caracas on fire, represents a significant cultural shift. Gone are the days when Venezuela was just an insignificant Latin American country, or a more ridiculed version of Mexico. It’s now the center of attention, the focus of evil in this world today.

I am not a big conoisseur of video games but it looks like marketers and the young kids they sell to are now beginning to view Hugo Chavez as a thuggish enemy of freedom and democracy. He’s the trash someone’s got to take out now, and that’s what’s supposed to spur video gamers. That’s the message out in pop culture land. The pro-offered solution is barbaric of course, hardly democratic revolution, but it is also a popular perception of conditions out there.

These video games have a powerful global reach and will spread far and wide – China, Italy, Egypt, Sweden, Japan – any place kids like to play video games. In the U.S. that demographic is the vast middle class but also includes the poorest – who are proportionately higher as fans. I think this appearance of a video game about Chavez as a madman represents a significant cultural shift on the global stage about the role of Hugo Chavez and may have implications for the future of Venezuela.

Any time you start hitting pop culture, you start reaching people far and wide. Hollywood (and this is Hollywood) is more powerful than anyone thinks. It could have implications for Venezuela, and I hope it doesn’t signal an end to democratic revolution.