Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Is Died At 58

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is dead. He died yesterday after a two-year battle with cancer, ending 14 years of tumultuous rule that made the socialist leader a hero for the poor but a hate figure to his opponents, the Reuters reports.

The flamboyant 58-year-old 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.

“We have just received the most tragic and awful information. At 4.25 p.m. (03.55 p.m. EST), March  5, President Hugo Chavez Frias died,” Vice- President Nicolas Maduro announced in a televised address, his voice choking.

“It’s a moment of deep pain,” he said in the address, in which he appeared with senior ministers.

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-United States. rhetoric and oil-financed policies that brought subsidized food and free health clinics to long-neglected slums.

Detractors, however, saw his one-man style, gleeful nationalizations and often harsh treatment of opponents as traits of an egotistical dictator whose misplaced statist economics wasted a historic bonanza of oil revenues.

Chavez’s death opens the way for a new election that will test whether his socialist “revolution” can live on without his dominant personality at the helm.



Humble roots

Chavez was raised by his grandmother in a house with a mud floor in rural Venezuela and evoked almost religious passion among poor supporters who loved his folksy charm, common touch and determination to put the nation’s oil wealth at their service. He burst onto the national scene by leading an attempted coup in 1992.

It failed and he was imprisoned, but he then formed a political party on his release two years later and swept to power in a 1998 election. It was the first of four presidential election victories, built on widespread support among the poor.

But Chavez alienated investors with waves of takeovers and strict currency controls, often bullied his rivals, and disappointed some followers who say he focused too much on ideological issues at the expense of day-to-day problems such power cuts, high inflation and crime.

Chavez built a highly centralized political system around his larger-than-life image and his tireless, micro-managing style created something close to a personality cult. He was particularly adept at exploiting divisions within a fractious opposition.

Chavez was briefly toppled in a coup in 2002, but returned triumphantly after his supporters took to the streets.

Apparently realizing the end was nigh, Chavez named Maduro his successor in December, just before his fourth operation, which followed months of grueling chemotherapy and radiation treatment.