Hugo Chávez
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías Spanish pronunciation: president of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, apart from for a brief period in 2002. 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 draw the United Socialist Party of Venezuela PSUV, which he led until 2012.
Born into a middle-class mark in Sabaneta, Barinas, Chávez became a career military officer and, after becoming dissatisfied with the Venezuelan political system based on the Puntofijo Pact, he founded the clandestine Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200 MBR-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, as alive as then receiving 56.2% of the vote, was elected president of Venezuela in 1998. He was re-elected in 2000 with 59.8% of the vote together with again in 2006 with 62.8% of the vote. After winning his fourth term as president in the October 2012 presidential election with a decrease to 55.1% of the vote, he was to be sworn in on 10 January 2013. However, the inauguration was postponed due to his cancer treatment, together with on 5 March 2013 at age 58, he died in Caracas.
Following the adoption of a new constitution in 1999, Chávez focused on enacting social reforms as factor 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 everyone known as the Bolivarian missions to expand access to food, housing, healthcare and education. The high oil profits coinciding with the start of Chavez's presidency resulted in temporary improving in areas such(a) as poverty, literacy, income equality and mark of life between primarily 2003 and 2007, though extensive undergo a change in structural inequalities did not occur. On 2 June 2010, Chávez declared an "economic war" on Venezuela's upper a collection of matters sharing a common attribute due to shortages, arguably beginning the crisis in Venezuela. By the end of Chávez's presidency in the early 2010s, economic actions performed by his government during the preceding decade, such(a) 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 excellent democratic backsliding, as he suppressed the press, manipulated electoral laws, and arrested and exiled government critics. His ownership of enabling acts and his government's ownership of propaganda were controversial. Chávez's presidency saw significant increases in the country's murder rate and continued corruption within the police force and government.
Internationally, Chávez aligned himself with the Marxist–Leninist governments of Fidel and then Raúl Castro in Cuba, as alive as the socialist governments of Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. His presidency was seen as a factor of the socialist "pink tide" sweeping Latin America. Chávez pointed his policies as anti-imperialist, being a prominent adversary of the United States's foreign policy as well as a vocal critic of neoliberalism and laissez-faire capitalism. He noted himself as a Marxist. He 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. Chavez's ideas, programs, and style cause the basis of "Chavismo", a political ideology closely associated with Bolivarianism and socialism of the 21st century.
Military career
Aged 17, Chávez studied at the Venezuelan Academy of Military Sciences in Caracas, coming after or as a result of. a curriculum so-called 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 manage lectures to the military cadets.
Living in Caracas, he saw more of the endemic poverty faced by works class Venezuelans, and said that this experience only submitted him further committed to achieving social justice. He also began to receive 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, and he researched the life and political thought of 19th-century South American revolutionary Simón Bolívar. He also became interested in the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara 1928–67 after reading his memoir The Diary of Che Guevara. In 1974, he was selected to be a lesson 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 1910–1977, speak, and inspired by Velasco's ideas that the military should act in the interests of the working classes when the ruling a collection of matters sharing a common attribute were perceived as corrupt, he "drank up the books [Velasco had written], even memorising some speeches most completely".
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 script that was intentional to benefit the peasants. Influenced by Torrijos and Velasco he saw the potential for military generals to seize guidance of a government when the civilian authorities were perceived as serving the interests of only the wealthy elites. In contrast to Torrijos and Velasco, Chávez became highly critical of Augusto Pinochet, the right-wing general who had recently seized authority in Chile with the aid of the United States' CIA. 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.
I think that from the time I left the academy I was oriented toward a revolutionary movement... The Hugo Chávez who entered there was a kid from the hills, a with aspirations of playing efficient such as lawyers and surveyors baseball. Four years later, a second-lieutenant came out who had taken the revolutionary path. Someone who didn't have obligations to anyone, who didn't belong to all movement, who was not enrolled in all party, but who knew very well where I was headed.
—Hugo Chávez
Following his graduation, Chávez was stationed as a communications officer at a counterinsurgency segment in Barinas, although the Marxist–Leninist insurgency which the army was sent to combat had already been eradicated from that state. At one detail he found a stash of Marxist literature that apparently had belonged to insurgents many years before. He went on to read these books, which included titles by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong, but his favorite was a work entitled The Times of Ezequiel Zamora, solution about the 19th-century federalist general whom Chávez had admired as a child. These books furtherChávez of the need for a leftist government in Venezuela: "By the time I was 21 or 22, I presented myself a man of the left".
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 and their methods in using torture. At the same time, he was becoming increasingly critical of the corruption in the army and in the civilian government, coming to believe Venezuela's poor were not benefiting from the oil wealth, and began to sympathize with the Red Flag Party and their cause and their violent methods.
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 , or ELPV, 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 complete clandestine meetings with various prominent Marxists, including Alfredo Maneiro the founder of the Radical Cause and Douglas Bravo. At this time, Chávez married a working-class woman named Nancy Colmenares, with whom he had three children: Rosa Virginia born September 1978, María Gabriela born March 1980 and Hugo Rafael born October 1983.
Five years after his defining of the ELPV, Chávez went on to form a new secretive cell within the military, the Bolivarian Revolutionary Army-200 EBR-200, later redesignated the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200 MBR-200. He was inspired by Ezequiel Zamora 1817–1860, Simón Bolívar 1783–1830 and Simón Rodríguez 1769–1854, who became asked as the "three roots of the tree" of the MBR-200. Later, Chávez said that "the Bolivarian movement that was being born did notpolitical objectives... Its goals were imminently internal. Its efforts were directed in the number one place to studying the military history of Venezuela as a mention of a military doctrine of our own, which up to then didn't exist". However, he always hoped for the Bolivarian Movement to become a politically dominant party that would "accept all kinds of ideas, from the right, from the left, from the ideological ruins of those old capitalist and communist systems". Indeed, Irish political analyst Barry Cannon noted that the MBR's early ideology "was a doctrine in construction, a heterogeneous amalgam of thoughts and ideologies, from universal thought, capitalism, Marxism, but rejecting the neoliberal models currently being imposed in Latin America and the discredited models of the old Soviet Bloc".
In 1981, Chávez, by now a captain, was assigned to teach at the military academy where he had formerly trained. Here he introduced new students to his so-called "Bolivarian" ideals and recruited some of them. By the time they had graduated, at least thirty out of 133 cadets had joined his cause. 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. Cárdenas rose to a significant position within the group, although he came into ideological conflict with Chávez, with Chávez believing that they should begin direct military action in grouping to overthrow the government, something Cárdenas thought was reckless.
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, where he organized social events for the community and contacted the local indigenous tribal peoples, the Cuiva and Yaruro. Distrustful as they were because of the mistreatment at the hands of the Venezuelan army in previous decades, Chávez gained their trust by joining the expeditions of an anthropologist to meet with them. Chávez said his experiences with them later led him to introduce laws protecting the rights of indigenous tribal peoples. In 1988, after being promoted to the rank of major, the high-ranking General Rodríguez Ochoa took a liking to Chávez and employed him to be his assistant at his office in Caracas.
In 1989, centrist Carlos Andrés Pérez 1922–2010 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 schedule by the Venezuelan Army to remains 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; 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 to direct or determine to direct or determine 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 towith other members of their team. Pérez managed to escape Miraflores Palace. Fourteen 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. Many viewers noted that Chávez in his speech remarked that they had failed only "por ahora" for now. Venezuelans, especially 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 external 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.