The Economist: Venezuela after Chavez. Now for the reckoning!g

In the flesh he seemed indestructible. Hugo Chavez was not especially tall, but he was built like one of the tanks he once commanded. He was possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy. He traveled incessantly, both around his vast country and abroad. Each Sunday, he would host live television shows lasting up to 12 hours. He would ring up ministers in the early hours of the morning to harangue them. For 14 years, everything that happened in Venezuela passed through his hands, or so he liked to think. Yet Mr Chavez turned out to have been as reckless with his health, as with his country's economy and its economy and its democracy. Those late nights were fueled by dozens of cups of sweet Venezuelan coffee. When in mid 2011, he revealed that he had been operated on for cancer, the lack of detail "a baseball sized tumor in the pelvic region" suggested that the diagnosis had come late. He turned down an offer of care from a Brazilian hospital that has recently cured three Latin American presidents of cancer, preferring treatment in Cuba, where his condition could be kept secret. Rather than stand aside from the presidency, he insisted that he could run his country from his Havana sickbed. After another two operations and chemotherapy, he declared himself cured. Addicted to the drugs of power and popular acclaim, he campaigned for, and won yet another six year term in an election last October. During the campaign, it was clear to those not blinded by loyalty, that Mr Chavez was still a sick man. After the election, he dropped out of sight, before making the somber announcement on December 8th, that he was going back to Cuba for yet another operation. If the worst happened, he said, Venezuelans should vote for Nicholas Maduro, his foreign minister and appointed vice president, as his successor. The six hour operation did not go well. After weeks, in which close family kept a bedside vigil, joined at times by senior officials, Mr Chavez returned home last month, to die on March 5th, at the age of 58. To the end, Mr Chavez's rule was narcissistic, with country and constitution subordinated to his whim. In the tradition of the Latin American "caudillo", he wanted to die with his boots on. When he was too ill to be sworn in for his new term on January 10th, his officials, with Cuban support, resolved to disregard the constitution that he himself had pushed through in 1999, and declared that the inauguration could happen at a later date. It will be harder for them to avoid the constitution's requirement, that in the event of the President's death, an election must be held within 30 days, though in practice a poll may be difficult to organize in such a short period.