The Chávez government is intent on forging a new state-led industrial base that would serve Venezuela’s new partners in the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). Venezuela’s private sector is sceptical, fearing that it will be left out of preferential new commercial deals between the import-addicted Socialist state and Mercosur suppliers, with state-run Venezuelan companies the only beneficiaries of any new export growth. On 12 February Vice-President Nicolás Maduro announced a string of investments in State companies with funding in local currency, US dollars and Euros that he said had been signed off from Havana, Cuba, by the cancer-struck President Hugo Chávez.…

Nothing more has been heard from President Hugo Chávez since his surprise return to Venezuela early on 18 February, fuelling speculation that plans are afoot for him to swear in privately before the supreme court and then step aside, triggering snap elections in which Vice-President Nicolás Maduro would bid to replace him. Senior ministers continue to insist that the president remains in full control of his faculties and continues to run the country, now from a hospital bed in Caracas, rather than Havana, Cuba. Chávez’s return after two long months in Cuba in almost total silence (because he literally could…