Hugo Chavez is famous for nationalising farms, factories and oil rigs but his latest appropriation comes closer to body snatching.
Venezuela’s socialist president closed an exhibition of dissected cadavers in Caracas and confiscated the contents because, he says, it reflects “moral decomposition”. The travelling show, Bodies Revealed, has stirred controversy in other countries for displaying 14 full-body human specimens and more than 200 organs. “We are in the midst of something macabre,” Chavez said on his weekly TV show. “They are human bodies. Human bodies! This is a really clear sign of the huge moral decomposition that is hitting our planet.”
Shocked by a newspaper report about the show’s arrival in Venezuela’s capital, the president last week ordered action.
The tax agency Seniat and Venezuela’s version of the FBI swooped on its opening day, evicted 400 visitors and carted away exhibits. The authorities will investigate whether the displays were illegally declared in customs as made of plastic.
Bodies Revealed uses a technique known as polymer preservation, involving embalming, dissection, dehydration and injections of liquid silicone. “Using real human specimens, painstakingly prepared and respectfully displayed, the Bodies Revealed exhibition lets visitors of all ages explore deep within the human body in a way that informs but doesn’t overwhelm,” says its website.
Debates over the origin of the bodies, which are Chinese, and whether donors gave permission, have fuelled controversy in New York and elsewhere. Critics have said voyeurism trumps scientific and artistic value, a point echoed by Chavez.
The confiscation follows a spate of expropriations of privately owned land and rice mills in Venezuela as part of an effort to extend state control over the economy and deepen “21st-century socialism” in the South American Opec member. —