Can Chavez Be Stopped?

VENEZUELAN DEMOCRACY SUFFERED another major blow this past weekend with the abolition of term limits for elected officials. This will enable Venezuela’s autocratic leader, Hugo Chávez, to run for president indefinitely. It will allow him to consolidate his budding dictatorship and further undermine the country’s fragile democratic institutions. Chávez’s current term ends in 2013, but he wants to serve as president for at least another decade, if not longer. “I am ready, and if I am healthy, God willing, I will be with you until 2019, until 2021,” he said in November 2008. Chávez had previously expressed a desire to remain president through 2030.