Rumours now abound of yet another coup attempt in Venezuela. Michael McCaughan reports
In middle-class areas of Caracas last week, residents awoke to find crude flyers pushed under their doorways advising them to stock up on food as a military coup was on the way.
Embattled Venezuelan President Mr Hugo Chavez has already survived one 48-hour coup in April when senior military officers and several of the country's richest businessmen briefly seized power before a spontaneous civil insurrection forced them into retreat.
Before the coup plotters left the building, however, government officials in the US and Spain welcomed the coup, revealing their contempt for Mr Chavez.
This time the conspirators will get it right; Mr Chavez will be offered a stark choice; exile or death. Dissident army units will take control of neighbourhoods loyal to Mr Chavez, preventing a repeat of the civil insurrection which restored him to office. The US government has already signalled it will not impose a boycott of Venezuelan goods should Mr Chavez be toppled. The EU has shown no interest in flexing its political muscle to help avert the coup.
The Venezuelan media will fan the flames of dissent, making outrageous claims against Mr Chavez without fear of being held to account. The Catholic Church hierarchy, opposition legislators and disaffected citizens, repackaged as civil society, will take to the streets, laying siege to the presidential palace.
Mr Chavez's followers will rally to defend their leader, the coup plotters will claim "uncontrollable chaos" and call for a firm army response "to preserve the institutions of the state". The Venezuelan army is likely to move against Mr Chavez's Circulos Bolivarianos, the controversial popular militia which underpins Mr Chavez's nationwide social reform project; when the national currency was devalued last April, shop-keepers hiked up prices; members of the Bolivarian circles, including teenagers and grandmothers, formed angry commissions who visited shops, refusing to leave until price increases had been repealed.
Mr Chavez, a charismatic former paratrooper who attempted a coup himself 10 years ago, has many enemies but his main problem is that he cannot be sure who his friends are. Over the past three years he has watched one electoral alliance after another collapse as he lurches from one crisis to the next, barely governing, his energy sapped by political infighting.
Since he assumed office in 1998, Mr Chavez has lowered unemployment, reduced inflation and increased living standards among the poor, successes which, if they occurred in Argentina, would be hailed as an economic miracle. The Venezuelan media declared war on Mr Chavez after the leader proposed a "right of reply" clause which would oblige all media to provide equal space to anyone attacked on TV, radio and in newspapers. Mr Chavez is now denounced as a "dictator".
The business class fell out with Mr Chavez when he announced plans to raise taxes and rewrite the constitution by declaring the right to social welfare superior to the right to business profits. He has provoked and annoyed with his sarcastic style, but he has never interfered with the media's right to roast him over an open spit, even when criticism descends into criminal irresponsibility.
In the aftermath of the April coup, Mr Chavez apologised for his abrasive style and launched a national dialogue to heal wounds. The talks were boycotted by the same powerful business people who launched the coup, thus insuring the failure of the initiative.
The situation now bears an eerie similarity to Chile in 1973 when a failed coup attempt against Salvador Allende in June of that year was followed by a brutal coup which installed Gen Augusto Pinochet in power for 16 years.
Michael McCaughan is a freelance journalist, specialising in Latin and South American affairs