Hugo Chávez
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías was a Venezuelan politician, revolutionary, and military officer who was the president of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013. Chávez was also leader of the Fifth Republic Movement political party from its foundation in 1997 until 2007, when it merged with several other parties to form the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, which he led until his death.
Born into a middle-class family in Sabaneta, Barinas, Chávez became a career military officer. After becoming dissatisfied with the Venezuelan political system based on the Puntofijo Pact, he founded the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200 in the early 1980s. Chávez led the MBR-200 in its unsuccessful coup d'état against the Democratic Action government of President Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1992, for which he was imprisoned. Pardoned from prison two years later, he founded the Fifth Republic Movement political party, and then receiving 56.2% of the vote, was elected president of Venezuela in 1998. He was reelected in the 2000 Venezuelan general election with 59.8% of the vote and again in the 2006 Venezuelan presidential election, with 62.8% of the vote. After winning his fourth term as president in the 2012 Venezuelan presidential election with 55.1% of the vote, he was to be sworn in on 10 January 2013. However, the inauguration was cancelled due to his cancer treatment, and on 5 March at age 58, he died in Caracas.
Following the adoption of the 1999 Venezuelan Constitution, Chávez focused on enacting social reforms as part of the Bolivarian Revolution. Using record-high oil revenues of the 2000s, his government nationalized key industries, created participatory democratic Communal Councils and implemented social programs known as the Bolivarian missions to expand access to food, housing, healthcare and education. While these initiatives led to temporary improvements in poverty reduction and social welfare during periods of high oil revenue, their reliance on state control and centralized planning exposed significant structural weaknesses as oil prices declined. The high oil profits coinciding with the start of Chavez's presidency resulted in temporary improvements in areas such as poverty, literacy, income equality and quality of life between primarily 2003 and 2007, though extensive changes in structural inequalities did not occur. On 2 June 2010, Chávez declared an "economic war" on Venezuela's upper classes due to shortages, arguably beginning the crisis in Venezuela. By Chávez's death in 2013, economic actions performed by his government during the preceding decade, such as deficit spending and price controls, proved to be unsustainable, with Venezuela's economy faltering. At the same time, poverty, inflation and shortages increased.
Under Chávez, Venezuela experienced democratic backsliding, as he suppressed the press, manipulated electoral laws, and arrested and exiled government critics. His use of enabling acts and his government's use of propaganda were controversial. Chávez's presidency saw significant increases in the country's murder rate and continued corruption within the police force and the government.
Across the political spectrum, Chávez is regarded as one of the most influential and controversial politicians in the modern history of Venezuela and Latin America. His 14-year presidency marked the start of the socialist "pink tide" sweeping Latin Americahe supported Latin American and Caribbean cooperation and was instrumental in setting up the pan-regional Union of South American Nations, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, the Bank of the South and the regional television network TeleSUR. Internationally, Chávez aligned himself with the Marxist–Leninist governments of Fidel and then Raúl Castro in Cuba, as well as the socialist governments of Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Chávez's ideas, programs, and style form the basis of "Chavismo", a political ideology closely associated with Bolivarianism and socialism of the 21st century. Chávez described his policies as anti-imperialist, being a prominent adversary of the United States's foreign policy as well as a vocal opponent of neoliberalism and laissez-faire capitalism. He described himself as a Marxist.
Early life
Chávez was born on 28 July 1954 in his paternal grandmother Rosa Inés Chávez's home, a modest three-room house located in the rural village Sabaneta, Barinas State. The Chávez family were of Amerindian, Afro-Venezuelan, Spanish and Italian descent. His parents, Hugo de los Reyes Chávez – described as a proud COPEI member– and Elena Frías de Chávez, were schoolteachers who lived in the small village of Los Rastrojos.Hugo was born the second of seven children. Chávez's childhood of supposed poverty has been disputed as he possibly changed the story of his background for political reasons. Attending the Julián Pino Elementary School, Chávez was particularly interested in the 19th-century federalist general Ezequiel Zamora, in whose army his own great-great-grandfather had served. With no high school in their area, Hugo's parents sent Hugo and his older brother Adán to live with their grandmother Rosa, who lived in a lower middle class subsidized home provided by the government, where they attended Daniel O'Leary High School in the mid-1960s. His father, despite having the salary of a teacher, helped pay for college for Chávez and his siblings.
Military career
Military academy
Aged 17, Chávez studied at the Venezuelan Academy of Military Sciences in Caracas, following a curriculum known as the Andrés Bello Plan, instituted by a group of progressive, nationalistic military officers. This new curriculum encouraged students to learn not only military routines and tactics but also a wide variety of other topics, and to do so civilian professors were brought in from other universities to give lectures to the military cadets.Living in Caracas, he began to get involved in activities outside of the military school, playing baseball and softball with the Criollitos de Venezuela team, progressing with them to the Venezuelan National Baseball Championships. He also wrote poetry, fiction, and drama, and painted. He also became interested in the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara after reading his memoir The Diary of Che Guevara. In 1974, he was selected to be a representative in the commemorations for the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Ayacucho in Peru, the conflict in which Simon Bolívar's lieutenant, Antonio José de Sucre, defeated royalist forces during the Peruvian War of Independence. In Peru, Chávez heard the leftist president, General Juan Velasco Alvarado, speak, and was inspired by Velasco's ideas that the military should act in the interests of the working classes when the ruling classes were perceived as corrupt.
Befriending the son of Maximum Leader Omar Torrijos, the leftist dictator of Panama, Chávez visited Panama, where he met with Torrijos, and was impressed with his land reform program that was designed to benefit the peasants. Influenced by Torrijos and Velasco he saw the potential for military generals to seize control of a government when the civilian authorities were perceived as serving the interests of only the wealthy elites. Chávez later said, "With Torrijos, I became a Torrijist. With Velasco I became a Velasquist. And with Pinochet, I became an anti-Pinochetist". In 1975, Chávez graduated from the military academy as one of the top graduates of the year.
Early military career
Following his graduation, Chávez was stationed as a communications officer at a counterinsurgency unit in Barinas.In 1977, Chávez's unit was transferred to Anzoátegui, where they were involved in battling the Red Flag Party, a Marxist–Hoxhaist insurgency group. After intervening to prevent the beating of an alleged insurgent by other soldiers, Chávez began to have his doubts about the army.
In 1977, he founded a revolutionary movement within the armed forces, in the hope that he could one day introduce a leftist government to Venezuela: the Venezuelan People's Liberation Army, consisted of him and a handful of his fellow soldiers who had no immediate plans for direct action, though they knew they wanted a middle way between the right-wing policies of the government and the far-left position of the Red Flag. Nevertheless, hoping to gain an alliance with civilian leftist groups in Venezuela, Chávez set up clandestine meetings with various prominent Marxists, including Alfredo Maneiro and Douglas Bravo.
Bolivarian Revolutionary Army-200
Five years after his creation of the ELPV, Chávez went on to form a new secretive cell within the military, the Bolivarian Revolutionary Army-200, later redesignated the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200. He was inspired by Simón Bolívar, Simón Rodríguez and Ezequiel Zamora, who became known as the "three roots of the tree" of the MBR-200.In 1984, he met Herma Marksman, a recently divorced history teacher with whom he had an affair that lasted several years. During this time Francisco Arias Cárdenas, a soldier interested in liberation theology, also joined MBR-200. After some time, some senior military officers became suspicious of Chávez and reassigned him so that he would not be able to gain any more fresh new recruits from the academy. He was sent to take command of the remote barracks at Elorza in Apure State.
1992 coup attempt
In 1989, Carlos Andrés Pérez was elected president, and though he had promised to oppose the International Monetary Fund's policies, once he got into office he enacted economic policies supported by the IMF, angering the public. In an attempt to stop widespread lootings and protests that followed his spending cuts, known as El Caracazo, Pérez initiated Plan Ávila, a military contingency plan by the Venezuelan Army to maintain public order, and an outbreak of violent repression unfolded. Though members of Chávez's MBR-200 movement allegedly participated in the crackdown, Chávez did not, since he was then hospitalized with chicken pox. He later condemned the event as "genocide".Chávez began preparing for a military coup d'état known as Operation Zamora. The plan involved members of the military overwhelming military locations and communication installations and then establishing Rafael Caldera in power once Pérez was captured and assassinated. Chávez delayed the MBR-200 coup, initially planned for December, until the early twilight hours of 4 February 1992.
On that date five army units under Chávez's command moved into urban Caracas. Despite years of planning, the coup quickly encountered trouble since Chávez commanded the loyalty of less than 10% of Venezuela's military. After numerous betrayals, defections, errors, and other unforeseen circumstances, Chávez and a small group of rebels found themselves hiding in the Military Museum, unable to communicate with other members of their team. Pérez managed to escape Miraflores Palace. Officially, thirty-two civilians, police officers and soldiers were killed, and fifty soldiers and some eighty civilians injured during the ensuing violence.
Chávez gave himself up to the government and appeared on television, in uniform, to call on the remaining coup members to lay down their arms. Chávez remarked in his speech that they had failed only "por ahora". Venezuelans, particularly poor ones, began seeing him as someone who stood up against government corruption and kleptocracy. The coup "flopped militarily—and dozens died—but made him a media star", noted Rory Carroll of The Guardian.
Chávez was arrested and imprisoned at the San Carlos military stockade, wracked with guilt and feeling responsible for the failure of the coup. Pro-Chávez demonstrations outside San Carlos led to his transfer to Yare Prison. Another unsuccessful coup against the government occurred in November, with the fighting during the coups resulting in the deaths of at least 143 people and perhaps as many as several hundred. Pérez was impeached a year later, charged with malfeasance and misappropriating funds.