文档介绍：委内瑞拉 Venezuela after Ch á vez Now for the reckoning Mar 5th 2013, 22:34 by The Economist online | CARACAS ?? IN THE flesh he seemed indestructible. Hugo Ch á vez was not especially tall, but he was built like one of the tanks he manded. He was possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy. He travelled 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 Ch á vez turned out to have been as reckless with his health as with his country ’s economy and its democracy. Those late nights were fuelled 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 tumour in the pelvic region ”) suggested that the diagnosis e 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 Ch á vez was still a sick man. After the election he dropped out of sight, before making the sombre 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 Nicol ás Maduro, his foreign minister and appointed vice-president, as his essor. The six-hour operation did not go well: after weeks in which close family kept a bedside vigil, joine