Hugo Chavez's Long Goodbye

摘要

Hugo Chavez had barely been in office two months when Nelson Chitty La Roche, a burly, gruff, gun-toting lawmaker from the Venezuelan political establishment, told me he was fed up. Chitty didn't care for the way the young socialist leader was pushing around Congress and threatening to rule by decree, and he let out, somewhat flippantly, that he was starting to map out plans to have him impeached.It was an absurd notion. In those heady, early days of the regime, Chavez was wildly popular. Polls showed he had the support of about 8G percent ofthe population, an estimate that, if anything, struck me as low. He was their showman, their savior, their avenger-the man who would speak for them and fight for them and provide for them.Trying to drive him out of power then would have caused a wicked backlash. And yet here was a high-ranking lawmaker talking openly about such a possibility, giving voice to a notion I've heard countless times since-that the Chavistas' days are numbered, that the regime is bound to collapse under the weight of its own incompetence.