Parrots screeched in the trees, ripening mangoes hung from the branches, and the South American diplomat was creased up in a wicker chair in his garden, laughing at my attempts to explain Venezuela in a clear, analytical fashion. I was in louche, lush Caracas again – for the first time since I lived there when Hugo Chávez first swept to power in the 1998 presidential election. But I was being “too logical,” the ambassador told me. “The first thing about Venezuela is that it doesn't make sense. The second is it doesn't work, and never did.”

It was an indiscreet comment, and also a little unfair, yet it contained a valid point. If you strip away President Chávez's “Narcissist-Leninist” rhetoric and US paranoia about Venezuela's links to Cuba, then Venezuela appears more as an example of maladministration than either the paragon of social justice it claims to be or the Gulag-in-the-tropics of its critics.

The system's inefficiency and incompetence became humiliatingly apparent when food-aid shipped to Haiti was recently returned to Caracas because it had passed its sell-by date – as had 100,000 tonnes of rotting food discovered earlier in state-owned warehouses. “US-backed fascist oligarchs” were the cause, fumed Mr Chávez, who rarely misses a chance to blame others for the country's problems. (His latest example was the exhumation of Simón Bolívar, Mr Chávez's hero, to test if the Liberator was poisoned 180 years ago by treacherous “oligarchs” in Colombia, which recently accused Venezuela again of sheltering Marxist guerrillas. Mr Chávez said Bogotá suffered from García-Márquez-esque fantasies.)