By
Frank Bajak/Associated Press
 |
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In this May 14, 2004 file
photo, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez gives a press conference at the
presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela. Venezuela's Vice President Nicolas
Maduro announced on Tuesday, March 5, 2013 that Chavez has died. Chavez, 58,
was first diagnosed with cancer in June 2011. (AP Photo/Leslie Mazoch, File)
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CARACAS, Venezuela - President Hugo Chavez was a fighter. The former paratroop commander and fiery populist waged continual battle for his socialist ideals and outsmarted his rivals time and again, defeating a coup attempt, winning re-election three times and using his country's vast oil wealth to his political advantage.
A self-described
"subversive," Chavez fashioned himself after the 19th Century
independence leader Simon Bolivar and renamed his country the Bolivarian
Republic of Venezuela.
He called himself a "humble
soldier" in a battle for socialism and against U.S. hegemony. He thrived
on confrontation with Washington and his political opponents at home, and used
those conflicts to rally his followers.
Almost the only adversary it seemed he
couldn't beat was cancer.
During more than 14 years in office,
his leftist politics and grandiose style polarized Venezuelans. The
barrel-chested leader electrified crowds with his booming voice, and won
admiration among the poor with government social programs and a folksy,
nationalistic style.
His opponents seethed at the
larger-than-life character who demonized them on television and ordered the
expropriation of farms and businesses. Many in the middle class cringed at his
bombast and complained about rising crime, soaring inflation and government
economic controls.
Before his struggle with cancer, he
appeared on television almost daily, frequently speaking for hours and breaking
into song or philosophical discourse. He often wore the bright red of his
United Socialist Party of Venezuela, or the fatigues and red beret of his army
days. He had donned the same uniform in 1992 while leading an ill-fated coup
attempt that first landed him in jail and then launched his political career.
The rest of the world watched as the
country with the world's biggest proven oil reserves took a turn to the left
under its unconventional leader, who considered himself above all else a
revolutionary.
"I'm still a subversive," the
president told The Associated Press in a 2007 interview, recalling his days as
a rebel soldier. "I think the entire world has to be subverted."
Chavez was a master communicator and
savvy political strategist, and managed to turn his struggle against cancer
into a rallying cry, until the illness finally defeated him.
He died Tuesday in Caracas at 4:25
local time after his prolonged illness.
From the start, Chavez billed himself
as the heir of Simon Bolivar, who led much of South America to independence. He
often spoke beneath a portrait of Bolivar and presented replicas of the
liberator's sword to allies. He built a soaring mausoleum in Caracas to house
the remains of "El Libertador."
Chavez also was inspired by his mentor
Fidel Castro and took on the Cuban leader's role as Washington's chief
antagonist in the Western Hemisphere after the ailing Castro turned over the
presidency to his brother Raul in 2006. Like Castro, Chavez vilified U.S.-style
capitalism while forming alliances throughout Latin America and with distant
powers such as Russia, China and Iran.
Supporters eagerly raised Chavez to the
pantheon of revolutionary legends ranging from Castro to Argentine-born rebel
Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Chavez nurtured that cult of personality, and
even as he stayed
out of sight for long stretches fighting cancer, his out-sized image appeared
on buildings and billboard throughout Venezuela. The airwaves boomed with his
baritone mantra: "I am a nation." Supporters carried posters and wore
masks of his eyes, chanting, "I am Chavez."
In the battles Chavez waged at home and
abroad, he captivated his base by championing his country's poor.
"This is the path: the hard, long
path, filled with doubts, filled with errors, filled with bitterness, but this
is the path," Chavez told his backers in 2011. "The path is this:
socialism."
He invested Venezuela's oil wealth into
social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor
families, free health clinics and education programs. Chavez also organized
poor neighborhoods into community councils that aided his party's political
machine.
Official statistics showed poverty
rates declined from 50 percent at the beginning of Chavez's first term in 1999
to 32 percent in the second half of 2011.
Chavez also won support through sheer
charisma and a flair for drama.
He ordered Bolivar's sword removed from
the Central Bank to unsheathe at key moments, and once raised it before militia
troops urging them to be ready to "give your lives, if you have to, for
the Bolivarian Revolution!"
On television, he would lambast his
opponents as "oligarchs," scold his aides, tell jokes, reminisce
about his childhood, lecture Venezuelans on socialism and make sudden
announcements, such as expelling the U.S. ambassador or ordering tanks to
Venezuela's border with Colombia. Sometimes he would burst into baritone renditions
of folk songs.
Chavez carried his in-your-face style
to the world stage as well. In a 2006 speech to the U.N. General Assembly, he
called President George W. Bush the devil, saying the podium reeked of sulfur
after the U.S. president's address.
At a summit in 2007, he repeatedly
called Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar a fascist, prompting Spain's
King Juan Carlos to snap at Chavez, "Why don't you shut up?"
Critics saw Chavez as a typical Latin
American caudillo, a strongman who ruled through force of personality and
showed disdain for democratic rules. Chavez concentrated power in his hands as
his allies dominated the congress and justices seen as doing his bidding
controlled the Supreme Court.
Chavez insisted Venezuela remained a
vibrant democracy and denied trying to restrict free speech. But some opponents
faced criminal charges and were driven into exile. Chavez's government forced
one opposition-aligned television channel, RCTV, off the air by refusing to
renew its license.
While Chavez trumpeted plans for
communes and an egalitarian society, his rhetoric regularly conflicted with
reality. Despite government seizures of companies and farmland, the balance
between Venezuela's public and private sectors changed little during his
presidency. And even as the poor saw their incomes rise, those gains were
blunted while the country's currency weakened amid the economic controls he
imposed.
Nonetheless, Chavez maintained a core
of supporters who stayed loyal to their "comandante" until the end.
"Chavez masterfully exploits the
disenchantment of people who feel excluded ... and he feeds on controversy
whenever he can," Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka wrote in
their book "Hugo Chavez: The Definitive Biography of Venezuela's Controversial
President."
Hugo Rafael Chavez Frias was born on
July 28, 1954, in the rural town of Sabaneta in Venezuela's western plains. He
was the son of a schoolteacher father and was the second of six brothers. His
mother was also a schoolteacher who met her husband at age 16.
Hugo and his older brother Adan grew up
with their grandmother, Rosa Ines, in a home with a dirt floor, mud walls and a
roof made of palm fronds.
Chavez was a fine baseball player and
hoped he might one day pitch in the U.S. major leagues. When he joined the
military at age 17, he aimed to keep honing his baseball skills in the capital.
But between his army duties and drills,
the young soldier immersed himself in the history of Bolivar and other
Venezuelan heroes who had overthrown Spanish rule, and his political ideas
began to take shape.
Chavez burst into public view in 1992
as a paratroop commander leading a military rebellion that brought tanks to the
presidential palace. The coup collapsed and the plotters were imprisoned.
When Chavez was allowed to speak on
television, he said his movement had only failed "for now." Chavez's
short speech, and especially those two defiant words, seared him into the
memory of Venezuelans and became a springboard for his career.
President Rafael Caldera, long an
advocate of political reconciliation, dropped charges against Chavez and other
coup plotters in 1994 and released them from prison.
Chavez then organized a new political
party and ran for president in 1998, pledging to clean up Venezuela's
entrenched corruption and shatter its traditional two-party system. At age 44,
he became the country's youngest president in four decades of democracy with 56
percent of the vote.
After he took office on Feb. 2, 1999,
Chavez called for a new constitution, and an assembly filled with his allies
drafted the document. Among various changes, it lengthened presidential terms
from five years to six and changed the country's name to the Bolivarian
Republic of Venezuela.
Chavez was re-elected in 2000 in an
election called under the new constitution. His increasingly confrontational
style and close ties to Cuba, however, disenchanted many of the middle-class
supporters who had voted for him, and the next several years saw bold attempts
by opponents to dislodge him from power.
In 2002, he survived a short-lived
coup, which began after large anti-Chavez street protests ended in shootings
and bloodshed. Dissident military officers alarmed by Chavez's growing ties to
Cuba detained the president and announced he had resigned. But within two days,
he returned to power with the help of military loyalists amid massive protests
by his supporters.
Chavez emerged a stronger president. He
defeated an opposition-led strike that paralyzed the country's oil industry and
fired thousands of state oil company employees.
The coup also turned Chavez more
decidedly against the U.S. government, which had swiftly recognized the
provisional leader who briefly replaced him. He created political and trade
alliances that excluded the U.S., and he cozied up to Iran and Syria in large
part, it seemed, due to their shared antagonism toward the U.S. government.
Despite the souring relationship,
Chavez kept selling the bulk of Venezuela's oil to the United States.
By 2005, Chavez was espousing a new,
vaguely defined "21st-century socialism." Yet the agenda didn't
involve a sudden overhaul to the country's economic order, and some
businesspeople continued to prosper. Those with lucrative ties to the
government came to be known as the "Bolivarian bourgeoisie."
After easily winning re-election in
2006, Chavez began calling for a "multi-polar world" free of U.S.
domination, part of an expanded international agenda. He boosted oil shipments
to China, set up joint factories with Iran to produce tractors and cars, and
sealed arms deals with Russia for assault rifles, helicopters and fighter jets.
He focused on building alliances throughout Latin America and injected new
energy into the region's left. Allies were elected in Bolivia, Ecuador,
Argentina and other countries.
Chavez also cemented relationships with
island countries in the Caribbean by selling them oil on preferential terms
while severing ties with Israel, supporting the Palestinian cause and backing
Iran's right to a nuclear energy program.
All the while, Chavez emphasized that
it was necessary to prepare for any potential conflict with the
"empire," his term for the United States.
He told the AP in 2007 that he loved
the movie "Gladiator."
"It's confronting the empire, and
confronting evil. ... And you end up relating to that gladiator," Chavez
said as he drove across Venezuela's southern plains.
He said he felt a deep connection to
those plains where he grew up, and that when he died he hoped to be buried in
the savanna.
"A man from the plains, from these
great open spaces ... tends to be a nomad, tends not to see barriers. You don't
see barriers from childhood on. What you see is the horizon," Chavez said.
Chavez wasn't shy about flaunting his
government's achievements, such as free health clinics staffed by Cuban
doctors, new public housing and laptops for needy children.
But even Chavez acknowledged in 2011
that one of his government's greatest weaknesses was a "lack of
efficiency." He called it "a big error that many times has put in
danger the government's policies."
Running a revolution ultimately left
little time for a personal life. His second marriage, to journalist Marisabel
Rodriguez, deteriorated in the early years of his presidency, and they divorced
in 2004. In addition to their one daughter, Rosines, Chavez had three children
from his first marriage, which ended before he ran for office. His daughters
Maria and Rosa often appeared at his side at official events and during his
trips.
Chavez acknowledged after he was
diagnosed with cancer in June 2011 that he had recklessly neglected his health.
He had taken to staying up late and drinking as many as 40 cups of coffee a
day. He regularly summoned his Cabinet ministers to the presidential palace
late at night.
Even as he appeared with head shaved
while undergoing chemotherapy, he never revealed the exact location of tumors
that were removed from his pelvic region, or the exact type of cancer.
Chavez exerted himself for one final
election campaign in 2012 after saying tests showed he was cancer-free, and
defeated younger challenger Henrique Capriles.
With another six-year term in
hand, he promised to keep pressing for revolutionary changes.
But two months later, he went to Cuba
for a fourth cancer-related surgery, blowing a kiss to his country as he boarded
the plane.
After a 10-week absence, the government
announced that Chavez had returned to Venezuela and was being treated at a
military hospital in Caracas. He was never seen again in public.
In his final years, Chavez frequently
said Venezuela was well on its way toward socialism, and at least in his mind,
there was no turning back.
His political movement, however, was
mostly a one-man phenomenon. Only three days before his final surgery, Chavez
named Vice President Nicolas Maduro as his chosen successor.
Now, it will be up to Venezuelans to
determine whether the Chavismo movement can survive, and how it will evolve,
without the leader who inspired it.
---
Biographical information for this
report was contributed by former Caracas bureau chief Ian James.
He was never seen again in public.
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