Late President Hugo Chavez used to call it “la revolucion bonita” (the pretty revolution), but the world looked at Venezuela last week and saw only ugliness. Protesters gunned down in the streets, barricades in flames, chaos. One of the dead was a 22-year-old beauty queen shot in the head. With the government censoring and cowing TV reports, many of the images came from smartphones, grainy and jerky snippets filled with smoke and shouts.

Here's the name of a government office that caught our attention: The Vice Ministry for the Supreme Social Happiness of the People. This is a newly created office in Venezuela, where government bureaucracy sure seems to be growing.

Throughout the fall, things looked bad for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. His popularity was tanking; most Venezuelans blamed his government for the economic crisis that had been plaguing the country since the end of 2012. In just one year, inflation had soared from 20 percent to more than 50 percent, and shortages of electricity, food, and other essentials had become a part of everyday life. Efforts to control pandemic criminal violence hadn’t yielded significant results, either.

Though Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez died in March, his successor Nicolas Maduro says he's still "everywhere." Everywhere, it turns out, means even in the rocks deep below Caracas, where workers are busy carving out a new subway tunnel. Maduro claims that late one night this week, workers briefly saw the late leader's face appear in the rocks.

Consider the latest from the gatekeeper of the late Hugo Chávez's experiment in "21st-Century Socialism": the Deputy Ministry of Supreme Social Happiness. Last week, to much fanfare, Nicolas Maduro unveiled this new government subdivision, which he said will oversee and troubleshoot some 30 separate social programs, known collectively in Venezuela as "missions."

Everywhere he looks nowadays, Nicolás Maduro sees conspiracies. At least a dozen plots to assassinate him have allegedly been detected since he became Venezuela’s president in April. Mr Maduro recently expelled three American diplomats for supposedly conspiring with the opposition, business groups and unions to wage “economic war” and overthrow the government. Some plots may even be real: there are rumours of discontent in the armed forces, on which the president is lavishing time and money. But publicly, at least, the opposition media are Mr Maduro’s prime suspects.

The army has been sent into toilet paper factories, fights for basic foodstuffs have resulted in several deaths and new, multi-million dollar oil tankers are sitting idle in dock. And, despite sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves, Venezuela’s socialist government can’t quite manage to keep the lights on.

There is most probably no left wing leader who had influenced public opinion inside and outside the Latin American part of the Western hemisphere to the same extent as the unconventional Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez had over the last decade. Doubtlessly, his death three weeks ago ended one phase of Venezuela’s political development. Now facing the caudillo’s loss, the electorate has to determine the sustainability of principal public diplomacy paradigms of the Chavez government.