"Rule by decree passed for Chavez" according to the BBC. Now I'm not much of a Chavez fan, not because of his policies to date, necessarily, but because I've seen this coming for some little time, and I'm allergic, both by nature and by training, to dictatorships (by any other name). If you care, follow me over the hump....
I have a mess (and I mean "mess") of degrees. The first and the second were in history/politics, focusing, respectively, on the Third Reich and the Soviet Union; while I would no longer call myself an expert on either (mental leakage, exacerbated by the recognition that, ultimately, I'm more a bullshit artist than a scholar), I remain at least modestly conversant with their brands of totalitarianism.
Buddy Hugo, from my perspective, is doing many of the right things to get himself included in a not altogether salubrious pantheon which, if I may include second-, third, and nth-tier horrors, might include Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Napoleon, Mugabe, Somoza, and stack of others, plus, in potentia, our own dear George (if he weren't a more or less compleat numbnutz and lived in another country).
Has very little to do with autocracy, really, in the classic sense: back when kings were kings and villeins were nervous, you had good ones and bad ones, kind of like CEOs and others overburdened with power and delusions of adequacy. The good ones tend to ask advice, whether, strictly speaking, they need to or not, and take into consideration such trifles as whether or not their "subjects" are more or less content.
Doesn't even have much to do with ideology: please note the inclusion of right,left and ambisinister. What it has to do with is the simple conviction that "I" know best and should therefore be allowed to determine the path the polity will take, down to the way you will button your drawers (or not).
People who aspire to this sort of power are, pretty much by definition, loose in the flue, so going along with them is generally non-habit-forming in the first instance. However, from my perspective, as an experienced depressive, cynic and aspiring misanthrope, the real issue (give or take the odd genocide) is that regimes led by such folk are necessarily self-limiting and implosive.
First off, our ultimate buck-stopper is, whether he acknowledges it or not, mortal, and dynasties honestly don't work like they use to: seems like they keep turning out wussies like Bashar Assad and Joseph Kabila, who apparently don't know the first thing about maintaining a suitable level of government terror. Besides, paranoids (which is what these guys are), raving or otherwise, apparently don't understand the necessity of telling their scions/understudies how to maintain the political edifice, how to, as it were, clean out the drainpipes, air the attic and, oh, where the light-switch is for that bijou dungeon in the back.
More to the point, however, our buck-stopper, by the very act of assuming ultimate power, becomes just that: the ultimate refrigerator against which all the spaghetti is thrown. And, in direct contradiction to my own experience, most of it will stick and, moreover, remain stuck indefinitely. The guy with all the ideas necessarily makes an enemy of anyone importunate enough to have one of his or her own. Unless he's damn clever, moreover, he's obviously the goat when one of his ideas goes wonky, which more than a few inevitably will. Finally, he's got to keep coming UP with ideas: revolutions really do eat their children, unless said children are inventive enough to keep the revolution going pretty much forever.
And that says to me that Hugo is toast. I don't do predictions, but I would hazard a guess that his efforts to make himself more or less permanent President by abolishing term limits won't do him much good, because he's got five years at the outside. If oil prices don't take him out (either in the traditional cycle or because we get half-smart and reduce demand by implementing alternative energy solutions), his current buddies and/or constituents will. In the meantime, he'll have to become (or reveal himself as) an evil bastard just to hang onto his power, so his legacy, which could have been bright-ish, will do the tube. A bit sad, really.