is a lecturer in the Department of Politics at UC Santa Cruz, and will soon be relocating to the University of Toronto. His current book project, To Rule by Obeying?: State and Power after Neoliberalism in Bolivarian Venezuela, tracks the revolutionary dialectic of constituent and constituted power in Venezuela from the 1980s to the present. He never got to meet Hugo Chávez. They did shake hands once, but he doubts he made much an impression on el Comandante.
The news from Caracas has not been promising for some time. The leader of the Bolivarian Revolution had not been seen since early December, when he travelled to Cuba to undergo emergency surgery for a still undisclosed form of cancer. On March 5, Vice President Nicolás Maduro announced that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez died in a military hospital.
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