Before concluding, it would be worthwhile to note the February 15, 2009, referendum in which Venezuelan voters agreed to lift term limits for all elected officials, including President Chávez. This was perhaps the most consequential political event in the history of Chavismo since the 2004 recall referendum. The removal of term limits significantly increases the chances that Chávez will remain in office for many years, even under bad economic conditions. Research has shown that authoritarian leaders tend to “win” between 80 and 90 percent of the elections in which they run, with the outcomes typically controlled through an array of restrictions and abuses.

Venezuela has essentially done away with a major tenet of Latin American democratic thought that dates back to Argentina and Mexico in the 1860s. The Mexican Revolution of the 1910s adopted the slogan “direct suffrage and no reelection,” in recognition of the fact that in societies where the institutions providing checks and balances are feeble, term limits are indispensable for the survival of democracy. The self-perpetuation of an unaccountable, clientelist elite is almost unavoidable in the absence of strong judicial, party, economic, and education systems. Historically, most Venezuelans have understood this reality, and even the 1999 constitution, with its dominant presidency, contained term limits.

By the time of the 2009 referendum, Chávez had already eliminated most other potential checks on his power. Term limits had at least raised the possibility of new leadership emerging from within the ruling party, and this process gained some traction during the 2008 regional elections. With term limits removed, however, major figures in the ruling party will compete only for subordinate posts that depend on Chávez’s blessing. In short, the potential rise of some form of intraparty democracy was replaced by the certainty of a servile, propresidential party apparatus.

Chávez won this enormously important referendum by using the conventional practices of electoral autocracies: extravagant and illegal state spending, heavy use of public media by the government, bureaucratic efforts to compel state employees to vote for the government, a decision by the electoral authorities to deny funding to the opposition campaign, and the exclusion of the opposition from the drafting of the referendum.

In addition to these standard tactics, Chávez introduced three innovations during the campaign. First, he aggressively encouraged the participation of the roughly one million Chavistas who had abstained from a failed 2007 referendum. Second, by rewording the referendum to allow indefinite reelection for all elected posts (not just the presidency), Chávez unified his party leadership, most of whom welcomed the opportunity to remain in power for life. Third, he made the somewhat bizarre argument that Venezuela’s institutional checks and balances were reliable enough without term limits, and that elections alone were sufficient to provide accountability. In other words, the country’s political system was more secure than those in other Latin American democracies, and indeed the rest of the world, where term limits are the norm. Although the proposal passed, the opposition increased its number of votes relative to 2007; these votes will be all the more important now that elections—such as they are—have become the only means of containing presidential power.