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.
