Maduro’s Venezuelan Independence Day Parade Features Cringey Alter Ego ‘Super Mustache’

An inflatable doll of "Super Mustache", a comics character depicting Venezuelan President
FEDERICO PARRA/AFP via Getty Images
Frances Martel

The socialist regime governing Venezuela used the occasion of the country’s Independence Day on Tuesday to debut a massive parade balloon of “Super Mustache” – an American-style superhero alter ego for dictator Nicolás Maduro.

Maduro, while not legally the president of Venezuela, remains in charge of the armed forces and law enforcement, making it impossible for the president of the country, Juan Guaidó, to govern. This includes organizing festivities for the two most important national holidays in the country, Independence Day and the birthday of the armed forces, both of which are celebrated on July 5. Venezuela turned 211 years old on Tuesday, as it was the first Spanish colony to turn on its monarchy in the Americas.

Maduro did not attend the parade, Venezuelan reports indicate, but sent the Súper Bigote balloon apparently in his stead. The balloon gloated from a giant parade float decorated with the Venezuelan flag and flanked by representatives of Venezuela’s indigenous community and soldiers wearing sanitary masks.

“Super Mustache” debuted as a cartoon clearly plagiarizing the American hero Superman in late 2021. In the cartoons, “Super Mustache” thwarts the plans of his nemeses, the leaders of the socialist anti-Maduro opposition and a figure in the White House that appears inspired by President Donald Trump. The first episode of “Super Mustache” blamed the nation’s constant power outages on a conspiracy organized by Trump and the Venezuelan opposition to weaken the Maduro regime with “electromagnetic” attacks. In reality, Venezuela’s power grid, under socialist management for two decades, is collapsing out of mismanagement and lack of maintenance.

In Maduro’s absence, his defense minister, Vladimir Padrino López, led the festivities on Tuesday. In his address to the parade attendees, Padrino credited late dictator Hugo Chávez, who governed in the 21st century, with establishing Venezuela’s “independence.”

“This revolution of July 5, 1811, began a long, arduous path towards liberty,” Padrino said, according to the Argentine newspaper La Nación. “We are treading this path today in the form of Bolivarian revolution as constructed at the hand of our Commander Hugo Chávez, of the patriots of today, of this people that is here, that listens to us, sees, and observes us.”

Despite being dead, Hugo Chávez retains the formal political title of “Supreme and Eternal Commander of the Revolution” at press time.

Padrino also took the opportunity to insult the United States, which Latin America’s far-left authoritarians typically refer to as “the empire” or “the imperialists.”

“It appears that the imperialists had the thought that, once Commander Chávez – an ideologue, the constructor of the philosophical bases of the Bolivarian revolution – had physically disappeared, they thought that the project would end,” Padrino declared, “and they do not interpret that the original spirit of that July 5, 1811, is alive in the people, it has never fainted.”

While Maduro did not attend Tuesday’s parade, he published a video message for his oppressed people from within the confines of his luxurious Miraflores Palace, greeting members of the National Bolivarian Armed Forces (FANB) and thanking them for protecting the “sacred soil of [Simón] Bolívar,” the nation’s founding father.

Maduro supporters and assorted socialists online used the occasion of Venezuelan Independence Day, as Padrino did, to circulate insults against the United States. One popular video resurfacing, undated in shared posts but apparently from sometime in 2021, featured Venezuelan armed forces chanting deadly threats against American soldiers.

“Listen pitiyanqui to what I’m going to tell you/you will never intervene in my country,” the chant begins, using a pejorative for non-Americans who have affection for the United States. “Listen little gringo we are ready/with Russian weapons we are waiting/we will be your Latin American Vietnam.”

The United States, like most of the free world, does not recognize Maduro as the president of Venezuela. Despite this, leftist President Joe Biden began to send delegations to Caracas to speak to Maduro and his henchmen in March. Reports at the time indicated that Biden expressed interest in purchasing sanctioned Venezuelan oil in a bid to replace oil from Russia that America and Europe had publicly claimed they would boycott in support of occupied Ukraine. Opponents of the deal noted that Maduro is a close ally of Russia’s – he was among the first world leaders in February to vocally support Vladimir Putin’s bombing of Kyiv – and heavily indebted to Russia, meaning any profits Venezuela made in selling oil to America would likely end up in Russia.

A second American delegation to Caracas met with top Maduro henchman Jorge Rodríguez, who runs the National Assembly, in late June, according to Maduro himself. Maduro did not disclose the details of the conversation – only that it happened – but reports citing anonymous sources claimed that Biden’s representatives were seeking to discuss freeing American citizens unjustly languishing in Maduro’s brutal penal system.

The conversations between Biden and Maduro representatives have alarmed Latin American leaders.

“Going to buy oil from Venezuela, from Maduro who has committed crimes against the Venezuelan people, who has the biggest immigration [crisis], that is negotiating with the devil and that is breaking with [my] principles,” conservative President of Guatemala Alejandro Giammattei told Breitbart News in an interview in June. “Maduro can have petroleum and I could have need, but I wouldn’t buy a gallon. I wouldn’t buy it for a simple reason: I would be nourishing the devil.”

The outgoing conservative government of Colombia – which Maduro regularly threatens to invade, similarly expressed disappointment with Biden in March.

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