An­to­nio María Del­ga­do writes for the Mi­a­mi New Her­ald. I would dare guess he's sup­posed to know en­glish, even if he writes in span­ish.

Let's back­track a bit. The Econ­o­mist pub­lish­es (as it has done for a while), some­thing called the "Mis­ery In­dex", which at­tempts to cap­ture the coun­tries where peo­ple are feel­ing mis­er­able, and rank them.

So, Mr. Del­ga­do goes, reads that, sees Venezuela near the top, and I can imag­ine the idea light­bulb bright­en­ing to a daz­zling 0.5 watts, his scream of "po­lit­i­cal an­gle!" and the rush to write this:

"Venezuela se ubicó el año pasa­do en el se­gun­do puesto del "Indice de Mis­e­ri­a" elab­o­ra­do por la re­vista británi­ca The Econ­o­mist..."

The prob­lem, dear eng­lish read­er, is that "mis­e­ri­a" does­n't mean "mis­ery". It means "pover­ty". In fac­t, it means "ex­treme pover­ty". And thus, Mr. Del­ga­do makes it seem as if the Econ­o­mist is say­ing Venezuela is the sec­ond poor­est coun­try (in some sense).

While I per­son­al­ly dis­like Chavez, this is ei­ther ig­no­ran­t, or stupid. Your cal­l.