A week of demonstrations in Venezuela . Three people shot dead ; dozens wounded ; dozens more arrested and imprisoned . Pro-regime thugs intimidate protesting high school and college students . The question is being asked : Is Chavismo finally cracking in Venezuela ? Hugo Chavez died of cancer nearly a year ago , and the question hanging over Venezuela is how long his strange regime can live after him . A country with a population smaller than Canada 's has more murders than the United States . Inflation exceeds 56 % . Goods from toilet paper to sacramental wine have vanished from shops . A regime that calls itself `` socialist '' has massively enriched the former president 's family and friends . Street lights dim at night because a country with some of the world 's largest energy reserves can not provide enough electricity . The Chavez regime has held power with four principal tools , all but one of which is gone or going . The first tool of power was the late president 's own mesmerizing personality . Venezuela has a bitter national history , and nobody has ever better voiced the resentments and yearnings of its subordinated classes and castes than Hugo Chavez . In a nation whose elite historically looked European , Chavez 's face proclaimed his descent from indigenous people and African slaves . He joked , he raged , he bestowed favors on the barrios and made enemies of the traditional upper classes . By contrast , the outstanding personal quality of Chavez 's chosen successor , Nicolas Maduro , was his cringing deference to the leader who elevated him from a bus driver 's seat to the top jobs in government . Venezuela expels three U.S. diplomatic officials . The second Chavez tool of power was the shrewd deployment of the nation 's oil wealth to buy support from favored constituencies . Support Chavez , and you might get a free house stocked with appliances , a government job or at least a new playground . Chavez held the price of gasoline to pennies per gallon and offered subsidized rice and beans in government-owned shops . Meanwhile , he withdrew police protection from the wealthier neighborhoods that despised him , deploying criminal violence as a de facto tool of political repression . Now , however , Venezuela is running out of cash to pay for these support-buying schemes . Industries are shuttering because they can not obtain foreign currency to buy crucial parts . Interest rates on Venezuelan debt have jumped past 15 % . The economy , which managed 1 % growth in 2013 , is now shrinking as economic activity other than oil and gas production grinds to a stop . Chavez 's third tool of power was control of the media . Independent television stations were eliminated . Newsprint shortages and other pressures were manipulated to force the sale of independent print media to government supporters . But it 's difficult to cut populations off from information in the modern age , especially for a ramshackle , technically incompetent regime like Venezuela under Chavismo . Venezuela is not China nor even Putin 's Russia . The people who understand how the Internet works overwhelmingly oppose the government . The fourth and last tool of power was outright repression . Chavez himself always used this tool sparingly . He preferred economic reprisals against his opponents to violence . He drove them into exile rather than send them to camps . He politicized the army and police , but he hesitated to use them , perhaps because he did not in the end fully trust them . When I visited Venezuela in 2010 , everybody was talking about elite Cuban paramilitary police units that Chavez had supposedly borrowed from Fidel Castro . But change is coming to Cuba too , and if the units ever existed , they certainly have not been visible in the past 's weeks clashes . Instead , Maduro has relied on local thugs . Perhaps the Syrian example inspires Maduro to hope that he can hang on if his forces just kill enough people . But Venezuela is located in a very different neighborhood , close not only to the United States but also to democracies in Colombia and Brazil that take a dim view of murderous dictatorship . ( Maduro has said that the opposition is mounting a `` developing coup '' and has issued an arrest warrant on conspiracy and murder charges against an opposition leader ; the opposition leader 's party blames the government for the violence . ) Chavez had an instinctive awareness that he could go so far but not too far . Whether Chavez 's successor shares that awareness of limits , those limits still exist -- and without crossing them , Chavez 's regime may have run out of the resources it needs to survive . As the Castro regime in Cuba has demonstrated , a moribund authoritarian system can take a long time dying . But the Castro brothers were serious about hanging on to power . Chavismo was serious about nothing .
David Frum : recent protests highlight weakness of the regime . He says that Maduro does n't have the charisma of Hugo Chávez . Frum : Venezuela 's economy is weak ; regime wo n't find it easy to buy support .