Super Moustache! Venezuelan government mocked over cartoon in which Nicolas Maduro takes on US

Venezuela’s humanitarian and economic catastrophe is so profound that it sometimes feels as though only a superhero could fix it.

Now, thanks to the propaganda arm of President Nicolás Maduro’s regime, that is exactly what is happening — at least on the South American country’s TV screens — as a flying, caped crusader wearing blue underpants over his red tights repeatedly saves his socialist nation from the dastardly machinations of the White House.

The character, Super Bigote, or Super Moustache in English, bears a striking resemblance to the moustachioed Maduro, albeit younger, more handsome and, of course, more muscular than the 59-year-old dictator and former bus driver.

The first episode of the one-minute cartoon, which aired in December, shows Super Moustache punching out of the sky an “electromagnetic drone” sent by the United States to sabotage Venezuela’s electricity grid. By halting the power cut, he saves the life of a patient in an operating theatre.

For good measure, the episode also depicts two Venezuelan opposition leaders, Henry Ramos Allup and Julio Borges, as chickens, one of them laying an egg out of fear at Super Moustache’s heroics.

Mr Borges, a former congressman, responded to the episode by tweeting photos of Venezuelans searching through rubbish for scraps of food. He added: “Here’s the truth; the Super Destroyer of Venezuela. Maduro is misery and corruption.”

A subsequent episode, released this month, shows the socialist superhero slaying a giant sea monster, with skeletal features and also sent by the White House, that had been blocking ships carrying Chinese, Cuban and Russian Covid-19 vaccines from reaching Venezuela.

Both episodes conclude with a blaring rendition of “Indestructible,” a classic by the salsa great Ray Barretto, while the occupant of the Oval Office, looking like a scrawny version of Syndrome, the baddie in the Invincibles franchise, but with a shock of Donald Trump-like blond hair, vents his frustration.

'A sophisticated piece of propoganda'

It is unclear whether the juvenile cartoon will succeed in winning over hearts and minds in a society ravaged for years by hunger, tyranny and one of the world’s highest murder rates.

Nevertheless, Guillermo Zubillaga, Venezuela coordinator at the Americas Society-Council of the Americas, a New York think tank, insisted that Super Moustache should be taken seriously as a sophisticated piece of propaganda funded with state money.

“It’s an Orwellian, repetitive, in-your-face message that it doesn’t matter what you do, we [the dictatorship] are not going anywhere,” Mr Zubillaga told The Telegraph. “That does have an impact on the population, which at this point doesn’t really have much choice but to listen to radio or watch TV owned or controlled by the regime.”

The cartoon comes as Covid-19 cases are “exploding” in Venezuela, according to Mr Zubillaga. He dismisses the Maduro regime’s claim that it has vaccinated nearly 53% of the population as improbable.

According to OPEC, Venezuela is the only nation with larger oil reserves in Saudi Arabia. But more than two decades of corrupt, repressive socialist rule have left the country, once one of the most affluent in Latin America, with a poverty rate above 90 per cent.

That has prompted an exodus of six million Venezuelan refugees, many of them now begging on street corners from Bogota to Buenos Aires. In terms of numbers, only the exodus from Syria has rivaled Venezuela’s refugee crisis in recent years.