It is hard to predict whether he will keep his resolution. One should not rely on suchlike politicians’ magnanimity. To proceed from the sense of easement, Chavez might as well take realize the takeover attempt as a justification of establishing totalitarian dictatorship and a warning not to make too much leftist “pirouettes” in domestic policy.
If we take a look at the events in Venezuela from outside only, their versatility just as well resembles Chili in 1973, Portugal in 1974 and even the putsch of August 1991 in the Soviet Union, when President was back to power two days afterwards. On the other hand, the inside story tells that the legally elected President had been leading the country to Cuban-type left dictatorship. This process is most likely to be continued. This perhaps will not happen at once, but gradually going through several stages like sweep ups in the army, stirring up lumpen elements engaged in forcible expropriation of property as in Zimbabwe, suffocating independent mass media sources etc. For how long it will take Venezuelans’ patience is quite a different matter. It is too early to make conclusions out of the events in Venezuela since they have been not over yet. What happened these days displays a high degree of the society’s disintegration, that means an equally high possibility of civil war.
Anyway, the history of the world has experienced paradoxes of that kind when formal following of democratic sequences led to totalitarian dictatorship, and their forcible suspension – to salvation of democracy. Two other examples, which may concern, can be also cited: the Algeria’s military government’s decision to abolish the election of 1992, which was won by Islamic fundamentalists, and Russian President Boris Yeltsyn’s ruling to dismiss the pro-Communist Supreme Council in 1993. The takeover attempt in Venezuela is probably part of the same old story.