Conspiracy theories like this are a staple of third world media, and their audience is fully conditioned to accept them as a matter of course. Hugo Chavez’s claim that the US caused the Haitian earthquake is another example. He knows his mob and he was apparently confident that he could make this absurd claim without being laughed out of the country.

This is consistent with a prediction I have been making for 20 years, that paranoid mega-conspiracy theories would eventually become a major factor in both domestic and international politics. The exponential expansion of media access, and the resulting information overload among people who lack the intellectual and cultural tools to process it rationally, is the basic cause. This is not limited to the third world either.