CARACAS: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has died after a two-year battle with cancer, ending the socialist leader’s 14-year rule of the South American country, Vice President Nicolas Maduro said in a televised speech on Tuesday.
The flamboyant 58-year-old leader had undergone four operations in Cuba for a cancer that was first detected in his pelvic region in mid-2011. His last surgery was on December 11 and he had not been seen in public since.
“It’s a moment of deep pain,” Maduro, accompanied by senior ministers, said, his voice choking.
Chavez easily won a new six-year term at an election in October and his death will devastate millions of supporters who adored his charismatic style, anti-US rhetoric and oil-financed policies that brought subsidized food and free health clinics to long-neglected slums.
He was architect of Bolivarian socialism ‘based in solidarity, in fraternity, in love, in justice, in liberty, and in equality’ and the ‘transformation of the economic model, increasing cooperativism, collective property, the submission of private property to the social interest and to the general interest’, created ‘from the popular bases, with the participation of the communities’. This socialism was not a dogma, however, but ‘must be constructed every day’.
The various attempts at overthrowing the Bolivarian government from power had only served to further radicalize Chávez. In January 2005, he began openly proclaiming the ideology of “Socialism of the 21st Century”, something that was distinct from his earlier forms of Bolivarianism, which had been social democratic in nature, merging elements of capitalism and socialism. He used this new term to contrast the democratic socialism which he wanted to promote in Latin America from the Marxist-Leninist socialism that had been spread by socialist states like the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China during the 20th century, arguing that the latter had not been truly democratic, suffering from a lack of participatory democracy and an excessively authoritarian governmental structure.
Chávez was a divisive figure both at home and abroad, having insulted other world leaders and compared US president George W. Bush to a donkey, and called him the devil.
He was a name of a Political ideology—-Bolivarianism.
Hated by United States and western media, he focused on implementing socialist reforms in the country under the banner of a social project known as the “Bolivarian Revolution”.
He will remain popular in history for new constitution, participatory democratic councils, the nationalization of several key industries, increased government funding of health care and education, and significant reductions in poverty in his country. He was a leader and icon of South America.
Under his leadership, quality of life improved at the third-fastest pace in the world in his country as according to a UN Index.
Born into a working-class family in Sabaneta, Barinas, Chávez became a career military officer, and after becoming dissatisfied with the Venezuelan political system, he founded the secretive Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200 (MBR-200) in the early 1980s to work towards overthrowing it. Chávez led the MBR-200 in an unsuccessful coup d’état against the Democratic Action government of President Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1992, for which he was imprisoned. Released from prison after two years, he founded a social democratic political party, the Fifth Republic Movement, and was elected president of Venezuela in 1998.
He subsequently introduced a new constitution which increased rights for marginalized groups and altered the structure of Venezuelan government, and was re-elected in 2000. During his second presidential term, he introduced a system of Bolivarian Missions, Communal Councils and worker-managed cooperatives, as well as a program of land reform, whilst also nationalizing various key industries. He was re-elected in 2006 with over 60% of the vote. On 7 October 2012, Chávez won his country’s presidential election for a fourth time, defeating Henrique Capriles, and was elected for another six-year term.
He was a brick of Communist bloc of Latin America that is intact even after the collapse of Communism in Russia and China—two mothers of Communism. He was one of the leaders including Fidel and then Raúl Castro in Cuba, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua who still believe that people are more important than expansion of corporate sector. Along with these governments, Chávez described his policies as anti-imperialist, being a prominent adversary of the United States’ foreign policy as well as a vocal critic of the US-supported neoliberalism and laissez-faire capitalism.
He supported Latin American and Caribbean cooperation and was instrumental in setting up the pan-regional Union of South American Nations, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, the Bank of the South, and the regional television network TeleSur. On 30 June 2011, Chávez stated that he was recovering from an operation to remove an abscessed tumor with cancerous cells. He required a second operation in December 2012. He was to have been sworn in on 10 January 2013, but the National Assembly of Venezuela agreed to postpone the inauguration to allow him time to recuperate and return from a third medical treatment trip to Cuba. He died in Caracas on 5 March 2013 at the age of 58.
