Chavismo After Chávez

What Venezuelans may remember most about last month’s presidential campaign is the moment right at the start, when Nicolás Maduro Moros, the late Hugo Chávez’s chosen successor, told a television audience that the supreme comandante had come back to him in the shape of a little bird and, chirping, urged him on to victory. There was also the time he promised that an ancient Indian curse would fall on those who voted for the opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles.
In a leaked video the minister of housing could be seen snarling at employees that he would fire anyone expressing opinions against Maduro. The new president’s former and possibly future rival for power, congressional leader Diosdado Cabello, tried to whip the opposition into line by announcing publicly that any member of the the Asamblea Nacional, Venezuela’s single-chamber parliament, who failed to recognize Maduro’s victory would not be given the floor. A few days later he amended that statement to say that any asambleista who refuses to recognize Maduro and is therefore not allowed to speak would not be working, and would consequently lose the month’s salary.
The new rich created by chavismo, theboliburguesia—nicknamed by the opposition because Chávez baptized everything he ran in honor of his hero, Simón Bolívar—fly in private jets and wheel about Caracas in Mercedes, clad in designer clothes and privilege.

Nor one can believe that the seven million people who failed to vote for Maduro are fascistas or really belong to the “oligarchy” or “bourgeoisie,” all three terms being used interchangeably, and sometimes in the same sentence.

While his political base crumbles, Maduro inaugurates theaters, attends circus performances, wears olive-green military-style shirts with ever-broader epaulets even though he never served in the army, and denounces coup and assassination plots against him.
Perhaps the plots and coups Maduro seems obsessed with are coming not from outside his party but from within. The growing tumult and disorder is so extreme, so clearly provoked, and so destructive that one must at least consider the possibility that it is being encouraged by defeated chavista rivals now smelling wounded prey, or from those sectors of the military who have never welcomed the Cuban presence in Venezuela, or both.