CARACAS,
Venezuela (AP) -- President Hugo Chavez, the fiery populist who declared a
socialist revolution in Venezuela, crusaded against U.S. influence and
championed a leftist revival across Latin America, died Tuesday at age 58 after
a nearly two-year bout with cancer.
Vice President Nicolas Maduro, surrounded by other government officials,
announced the death in a national television broadcast. He said Chavez died at
4:25 p.m. local time.
During more than 14 years in office, Chavez routinely challenged the
status quo at home and internationally. He polarized Venezuelans with his
confrontational and domineering style, yet was also a masterful communicator
and strategist who tapped into Venezuelan nationalism to win broad support,
particularly among the poor.
Chavez repeatedly proved himself a political survivor. As an army
paratroop commander, he led a failed coup in 1992, then was pardoned and
elected president in 1998. He survived a coup against his own presidency in
2002 and won re-election two more times.
The
burly president electrified crowds with his booming voice, often wearing the
bright red of his United Socialist Party of Venezuela or the fatigues and red
beret of his army days. Before his struggle with cancer, he appeared on
television almost daily, talking for hours at a time and often breaking into
song of philosophical discourse.
Chavez used his country's vast oil wealth to launch social programs that
include state-run food markets, new public housing, free health clinics and
education programs. Poverty declined during Chavez's presidency amid a historic
boom in oil earnings, but critics said he failed to use the windfall of
hundreds of billions of dollars to develop the country's economy.
Inflation soared and the homicide rate rose to among the highest in the
world.
Chavez underwent surgery in Cuba in June 2011 to remove what he said was
a baseball-size tumor from his pelvic region, and the cancer returned
repeatedly over the next 18 months despite more surgery, chemotherapy and
radiation treatments. He kept secret key details of his illness, including the
type of cancer and the precise location of the tumors.
"El Comandante," as he was known, stayed in touch with the
Venezuelan people during his treatment via Twitter and phone calls broadcast on
television, but even those messages dropped off as his health deteriorated.
Two months after his last re-election in October, Chavez returned to
Cuba again for cancer surgery, blowing a kiss to his country as he boarded the
plane. He was never seen again in public.
After a 10-week absence marked by opposition protests over the lack of
information about the president's health and growing unease among the
president's "Chavista" supporters, the government released
photographs of Chavez on Feb. 15 and three days later announced that the
president had returned to Venezuela to be treated at a military hospital in
Caracas.
Throughout his presidency, Chavez said he hoped to fulfill Bolivar's
unrealized dream of uniting South America.
He was also inspired by Cuban leader Fidel Castro and took on the aging
revolutionary's role as Washington's chief antagonist in the Western Hemisphere
after Castro relinquished the presidency to his brother Raul in 2006.
Supporters saw Chavez as the latest in a colorful line of revolutionary
legends, from Castro to Argentine-born 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."
Chavez saw himself as a revolutionary and savior of the poor.
"A revolution has arrived here," he declared in a 2009 speech.
"No one can stop this revolution."
Chavez's social programs won him enduring support: Poverty rates
declined from 50 percent at the beginning of his term in 1999 to 32 percent in
the second half of 2011. But he also charmed his audience with sheer charisma and
a flair for drama that played well for the cameras.
He ordered the sword of South American independence leader Simon Bolivar
removed from Argentina's Central Bank to unsheathe at key moments. On
television, he would lambast his opponents as "oligarchs," announce
expropriations of companies and lecture Venezuelans about the glories of
socialism. His performances included renditions of folk songs and impromptu
odes to Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong and 19th century philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche.
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 Bush's address.
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 with allies who dominated the congress
and justices who controlled the Supreme Court.
He insisted all the while that Venezuela remained a vibrant democracy
and denied trying to restrict free speech. But some opponents faced criminal
charges and were driven into exile.
While Chavez trumpeted plans for communes and an egalitarian society,
his soaring 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 economic controls.
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 schoolteacher parents
and the second of six brothers.
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 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. When the coup
collapsed, Chavez was allowed to make a televised statement in which he
declared that his movement had failed "for now." The speech, and
those two defiant words, launched his career, searing his image into the memory
of Venezuelans.
He and other coup prisoners were released in 1994, and President Rafael
Caldera dropped the charges against them.
Chavez then organized a new political party and ran for president four
years later, vowing to shatter Venezuela's 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.
Chavez was re-elected in 2000 in an election called under a new
constitution drafted by his allies. His increasingly confrontational style and
close ties to Cuba, however, disenchanted many of the middle-class supporters
who had voted for him. The next several years saw bold but failed attempts by
opponents to dislodge him from power.
In 2002, he survived a short-lived coup, which began after a large
anti-Chavez street protest ended in deadly shootings. Dissident military
officers detained the president and announced he had resigned. But within two
days, he returned to power with the help of military loyalists while his
supporters rallied in the streets.
Chavez emerged a stronger president. He defeated a subsequent
opposition-led strike that paralyzed the country's oil industry, and he 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 had 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 sold the bulk of Venezuela's
oil to the United States.
He easily won re-election in 2006, and then said it was his destiny to
lead Venezuela until 2021 or even 2031.
"I'm still a subversive," Chavez said in a 2007 interview with
The Associated Press. "I think the entire world has to be subverted."
Playing such a larger-than-life public figure 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 Chavez ran for office.
Chavez acknowledged after he was diagnosed with cancer that he had been
recklessly neglecting 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.
He often said he believed Venezuela was on its way down a long road
toward socialism, and that there was no turning back. After winning re-election
in 2012, he vowed to deepen his push to transform Venezuela.
His political movement, however, was mostly a one-man show. Only three
days before his final surgery, Chavez named 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.
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