Follow our live coverage of the unfolding situation in Venezuela here.

Lima: Shortly after the death of Hugo Chavez in 2013, Nicolás Maduro, who succeeded him as Venezuelan president, went on national television to claim that his late political mentor had reappeared to him as a tiny songbird.

Apparently speaking in earnest, the left-wing populist claimed that the chirping bird had circled his head several times as he prayed in a chapel, and that the pair then whistled back and forth to each other in conversation.

Hugo Chavez (left) with then foreign minister Nicolás Maduro in 2007. Credit: AP

“I felt his [Chavez’s] spirit,” Maduro told millions of Venezuelans during the live address. “I felt him blessing us and telling us: ‘Today, the battle starts. Head to victory, take our blessings.’ That’s how I felt him in my soul.”

The absurd scene neatly encapsulates the former bus driver and union leader’s 13-year presidency of Venezuela.

During that time, he constructed an elaborate official narrative based on bizarre mythologising and outright lies in a necessary refusal to acknowledge the calamitous, real-world consequences of his own policies.

Maduro raises his fist as he holds up the official certificate declaring him winner of the presidential election in 2013.Credit: AP

It also reflects the fact that Maduro owed his entire political capital and branding – and possibly even survival as president – to his career as one of the late strongman leader’s closest loyalists.

While Maduro, 63, who has just been dramatically detained and whisked out of the South American country by US special forces, painted an increasingly surreal picture of Venezuela as a “Bolivarian socialist” paradise, ordinary citizens were forced to live in ever greater squalor and fear of their own government.

Venezuela is, according to........

© The Sydney Morning Herald