Sean Penn visited Venezuela and met with socialist dictator Hugo Chavez. According to the AP, Penn said:
“I’m also here as a journalist and so I owe it to that medium to wait until I’ve digested, fact-checked and finished my journey here” before saying more, Penn said.
This article described Penn’s visit as a very unbiased, inquisitive look as the socialist government’s rule over Venezuela. The writer does his best to paint Penn in a very subdued light, as just another “journalist” looking for the facts.
While Chavez made a speech, however, Penn stood at a distance alongside the audience, occasionally jotting down notes. He spoke only when Chavez asked the actor to say a few words.
But this article from the day before paints a different picture of Penn’s visit.
“In the name of the peoples of the world, President Bush, withdraw the troops from Iraq. Enough already with so much genocide,” Chavez said before an auditorium packed with his red-clad supporters.
Penn sat near the front, at times applauding and nodding in agreement.
(emphasis mine)
Chavez has hosted celebrities from Hollywood before. He has even signed a deal with Danny Glover to make two movies in Venezuela:
Actor Danny Glover has agreed to make two movies financially backed by the Venezuelan government, but U.S. officials are calling the deal “tainted.”
The Venezuelan National Assembly is giving the national production company, La Villa del Cine, $19.7 million to make the two films. The first, which Glover will direct, is about Francois Dominique Toussaint-Louverture, a Haitian independence leader. The second is a film adaptation of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, “The General in His Labyrinth,” about Simon Bolivar.
According to Venezuela’s state-run television station, TeleSur, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez started La Villa del Cine in 2006 to combat “the dictatorship of Hollywood” and spread the story of Latin America.
Both movies will be filmed in Venezuela.
There is a long history of Hollywood supporting socialism and its dictators. This is just the latest chapter.
