Making sense of 'La Salida' : challenging left-wing control in Venezuela

Abstract

The date of March 5, 2013, is one that Venezuelans are unlikely to ever forget. On this day, after 14 years in power, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías died of cancer in a military hospital in Caracas. A month after his death, on the 14thof April, presidential elections were held to fill Chávez’s empty seat. Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s long-serving foreign minister who had assumed the interim presidency since his death, ran as his hand-picked successor.² In the closest presidential elections Venezuelans had seen since the late 1960s, Maduro was elected president of the Bolivarian Republic: only a 1.59 percentage point.