Political remakes, when twisted around, are always ugly. What Chavez has been doing these past week is truly awful, damaging himself more than one could think it possible.
In short, neither does Chavez recognize the small gains the opposition made, nor the democratic ways it showed when Chavez campaigned brutally against it like the low life thug he is at heart. Yesterday he announced that he will not work with the newly elected governors of the opposition, and asked his people to oppose them at any step. He will cut their funding and name a parallel government. His supporters are also emptying all what they can from the state offices to be taken who knows where. That is, chavistas are looting state property. Chavez went even as far as saying that the new governors are already destroying his misiones and firing people when THEY HAVE NOT EVEN BEEN SWORN IN YET!!!! I mean the guys cannot even walk into their office yet and they are already busy firing chavistas, conspiring against Chavez and mounting a coup 2002 style funded by the CIA and what not. You can read it all from a softer version here, to cruder ones here and here.
The problem here is that Chavez thinks he is rallying his red shirt when in fact he is showing what a thug he is and how incompetent he is. After all, when any of these red shirts get a rare moment of lucidity they might start wondering how come these new elected governors are not rotting in jail if they are that dangerous.
But the more interesting reflection at this point is to notice that when Chavez once again drags in the tired 2002 coup arguments he does not realize that he has behaved much worse than Carmona and that all that he has done since then has done more to destroy Venezuelan democracy than what Carmona attempted to do. Oh! Chavez did it all "legally" but the consequences are the same: when the head of a state behaves like Chavez behaved yesterday in Vargas you know that there is no check and balance left in the country and thus democracy is likely dead.
For the fun detail: Chavez even announced that he wanted to change the name of the state because Vargas, the first civilian president of Venezuela, because was not Bolivarian enough (read, not a military thugs like all of his heroes besides Bolivar). How long until sycophant Garcia Carneiro satisfies his wishes?
-The end-