If you ever wondered just how disgusting and inane Spanish-language talk shows can get, watch the clip above. An alert blogger captured this video of a Venezuelan talking head (on the left-hand side of the screen) shooting his mouth off just a bit too high. And if you can’t understand Spanish, don’t worry — Aporrea has the lowdown:
Venezuelan TV host Rodner Figueroa, 42, was fired by Univisión for a racist comment about US first lady Michelle Obama on Wednesday.
The presenter of the show “Salt and Pepper”, and known as the network’s fashionista, Figueroa made vulgar comments about the appearance of the first lady, and said that she looked like she had come from the film Planet of the Apes.
“There is no space for racist commentaries on Univisión,” said a high-level executive of the network in an exclusive interview with People en Español.
Translation mine.
The only thing truly surprising about this is that finally, a Venezuelan TV host got fired by a major media corporation for being an overt racist. These are the same goose-stepping idiots who launched racist attacks against Chavecito, Evo and other non-white progressive Latino leaders for years with total impunity. Chavecito, in particular, had to put up with this species of right-wing jackasses in overpriced suits calling him a monkey from the moment he began campaigning for office in the late 1990s. Pretty much every Spanish-language media corporation let such slurs pass unedited and unremarked.
But then again, Chavecito was not the president of the United States of Amnesia. Michelle Obama, by contrast, is first lady there. And it’s against corporate policy to criticize the gringo leadership, because all these so-called Latino channels actually have pledged allegiance to Washington and Miami. So, of course, this particular bit of racism wasn’t allowed to slide.
Rodner Figueroa is out on his ass, and he’s the rare exception. The fact that he felt comfortable saying shit like that clearly shows that a climate of overt racism is the norm at Univisión and other Latin American corporate broadcasters. Had there actually been a corporate policy against any kind of racism, I doubt very much that he would have spouted that unoriginal simian comparison as blithely as he did.
