Imagine you’re Nicolás Maduro. You’re down in the polls. People are angry about empty shelves. You’re in need of someone new, a new face for spinning the economic crisis … somebody untainted enough to provide a semblance of a fresh start, yet dogmatic enough to please the entrenched interests in the ruling party. If I were Maduro, the recipe I would follow would be to find:

Yesss. Yessss. Take complete ignorance, add a dash or chutzpah, a morsel of groveling, a smidgen of youth, and a grain of psychotic longing for the Eternal Commander, and you get … Andrés Eloy Méndez, Superintendent for Price Controls, the newest, brightest star in chavista economic policy circles.

Something tells me we’ll be hearing a lot more from him.