Venezuela after Chavez.

• Author: Duddy, Patrick
• Position: Hugo Chavez

I was in Sao Paulo, Brazil with a group of Duke University business students when the local media carried the news that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez had died. By the time I got back to my laptop in the hotel I had already received nearly a dozen media queries. Over the next several weeks I would speak to the New York Times, BBC, NPR, the Brazilian newspapers Folha and O Globo, Argentina's La Nacion and Cronista, Bloomberg News, Deutsche Welle, the Washington Diplomat and others. While I was in Brazil with my students, I begged off invitations to appear on a range of television news programs, explaining that I was a continent away, but managed to knockout an op-ed for CNN's Global Public Square website. The media wanted to know what anyone who had a role in the Chavez story thought about his passing. They were contacting me because I was the last Senate confirmed U.S. ambassador to Venezuela and had been expelled by President Chavez in an epithet filled tirade on national television. As it happens, I wasn't in Venezuela when I was supposedly thrown out. Because my wife was about to have surgery in Washington, I was with her. I didn't return to Caracas for nine months and my return, when it happened, was precedent setting. I was, as nearly as anyone at the State Department could discover, the first U.S. ambassador ever to return to the same country in the same capacity, accredited to the same government after having been declared persona non grata.

By and large, the press mostly focused on three questions with me. What was my reaction to Chavez's death? Did I know acting President Nicolas Maduro? And, what were the chances that U.S. -Venezuelan relations would improve now that the Comandante had been called to a higher service. Because I had initially served as ambassador for President Bush and, after being expelled in 2008, had returned to Caracas in 2009 as President Obama's ambassador, some media added a fourth question. How did the Obama administration's approach to the Chavez government differ from the Bush approach? Answering three of the four questions was easy.

My first thought on hearing of Chavez's death was that his departure would leave an enormous hole in Venezuela's political landscape. Chavez had seemed to me the glue that held together not only his own movement but also the rather disparate coalition of new and traditional parties that make up the opposition. His death, I suspected, would render Chavismo vulnerable at the ballot box and offer an opportunity for the opposition to reset and mount another attempt to win the presidency in the snap election required by the constitution. An ailing Chavez had won reelection in October of 2012 by a relatively comfortable 10-point margin and his supporters had gone on to sweep 20 of 23 governorships in the gubernatorial elections two months later. The opposition was disappointed but could take some consolation in their success in uniting a wide range of parties and political movements behind the presidential candidacy of the young governor of the state of Miranda, Henrique Capriles Radonski. Consequently, Capriles managed a better than respectable showing in the October contest. At just shy of 45% he had come closer to defeating Chavez than any previous...