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Buenos Aires: If Homer Simpson and his family are planning any South American vacations in the near future, they might want to come up with a backup plan.
The television show The Simpsons is nothing short of a cultural phenomenon in many parts of the continent, but it also has become very good at exposing the region's rawest nerves, then clawing them sore.
In the same week that Venezuela threatened to punish a television station for exposing children to the show, a snippet of dialogue from a recent instalment is kicking up controversy in Argentina.
During the episode, Homer and his friends gathered at Moe's Tavern and grumbled about their choices of political candidates. The conversation seemed innocent enough, until Homer's buddy Carl Carlson opened his mouth.
"I'd really go for some kind of military dictator, like Juan Peron," Carl said, mentioning the general who was elected president by Argentines three times. "When he 'disappeared' you, you stayed disappeared." Carl's friend Lenny then delivered a coup de grace: "Plus, his wife was Madonna."
Most Argentines don't consider Peron a dictator, and they certainly don't blame him for the fact that up to 30,000 dissidents went missing during the country's "dirty war". Those disappearances are attributed to a military dictatorship that ruled from 1976 to 1983, after Peron's death.
Great harm
"This type of programme causes great harm, because the disappearances are still an open wound here," former congressman Lorenzo Pepe, who now heads the Juan Domingo Peron Institute, said of the episode. "This is highly offensive to Argentines."
The reference to Madonna also riled Peronistas. Peron's second wife, Eva, is so beloved here that her ardent backers launched protests after the pop star was cast to portray her in the 1996 movie Evita. "The part about Madonna - that was too much," Pepe said.
The offences might have gone unnoticed had it been any other programme. The show, after all, hasn't even aired yet in Argentina. (It's popular on YouTube.) But in much of South America, Los Simpson are even more popular than they are in the United States.
When The Simpsons Movie debuted last year, it broke box-office records for an opening weekend in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Colombia.
Despite the popularity, Venezuela's telecommunications commission last week threatened to punish a television station that aired The Simpsons during the daytime. The government agency earlier this year had declared that the programme was unsuitable for children. The television station replaced it with another programme presumably considered more edifying to the development of the country's youth: Baywatch Hawaii.
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