The crisis hasn’t come from nowhere. It is the inevitable product of Chavez’s brand of socialism, which created a base of support by convincing the urban poor that they were the victims of a conspiracy by the rich. The base has been kept on side with social services bought with the use of oil, fostering a false economic boom and a fantasy of progress. Beneath the surface, civil society has been allowed to stagnate. Now that Chavez is dead and the magic gone, there is anarchy. We might even ask if the elections that put Chavezism in office were ever truly legitimate. Yes, they were technically democratic (although the opposition complained that the odds were rigged against them) but the Chavezistas were never really committed to democracy in the orthodox, liberal sense. They were constructing a new order out of clientism. It’s astonishing that their supporters in the West couldn’t see this, that they deluded themselves that Hugo was building a Latin American Sweden.

And perhaps the breaking of the spell accounts for some of the relative quietness about what’s happening right now in Venezuela. Some Left-wing commentators understandably don’t wish to comment: one Labour MP appeared to raise the threat of legal action when the subject was raised on Twitter. The European and American enthusiasm for Chavez was born out of an understandable, sympathetic desire to see a country defy the neo-liberal model and go it alone – to turn away from the US, a power that has so often meddled in Latin America with appalling results. But the slow collapse of Venezuela into lawlessness demonstrates that the economic facts of life cannot be ignored. You can’t buy a democracy, you can’t bribe people to build a paradise. And when the money runs out, all that holds the new state together is force.