Buying time to secure their own political future, Venezuelan officials carefully stage-managed Chávez’s illness and eventual death, even suggesting near the end, while he was undergoing complex and agonizing cancer treatments, that he was still “walking and exercising.” The information vacuum was reminiscent of the secrecy surrounding the deaths of Stalin and Mao, and the practice in the Ottoman empire of keeping the sultan’s death a secret for weeks until the succession was settled.