Venezuelan president Chavez dies

This video is called ‘Chavez is punishment for the rich & a hope for the poor’.

By Bill Van Auken in the USA:

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez dead

6 March 2013

After 14 years in power as Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, a former military officer and left nationalist, died in a military hospital in Caracas Tuesday afternoon following a two-year battle with cancer.

Chavez, who was 58, came to national prominence as the leader of an abortive military coup against the corrupt regime of Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez, the leader of Accion Democratica, a social democratic bourgeois party. Andrés Pérez was responsible for the bloody repression of the “Caracazo”—a popular uprising against IMF-dictated austerity measures in which up to 3,000 were killed.

Freed after two years of imprisonment, Chavez founded his “Bolivarian” movement and ran for president in 1998, claiming that he represented “neither the left nor the right,” but was committed to a program of social and economic reform and an end to the corrupt two-party system that had traded power over previous decades between Accion Democratica and the Christian Democratic Copei party.

After gaining power, he began espousing a left populist political platform, identifying himself as both a nationalist and “socialist.”

Chavez earned the implacable hostility of Washington with his populist and nationalist politics. This included clashes with US-based energy conglomerates sparked by his assertion of greater national control over the exploitation of the country’s petroleum resources, his partial nationalizations, his economic backing for Cuba, and his pursuit of closer economic ties with US imperialism’s rival, China.

In April 2002, the CIA backed a coup that saw Chavez briefly ousted from power and imprisoned before he was restored to the presidential palace by a combination of loyal military units and a popular revolt among the more impoverished layers of the population.

Throughout Chavez’s presidency, Washington utilized agencies such as USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy and the CIA to fund and advise a right-wing political opposition that had its main base of support among sections of the Venezuelan oligarchy, which bitterly resented Chavez’s appeal to the poor as well as his own mixed-race and lower-middle class origins. Despite Chavez’s repeated victories in contested elections, successive US administrations and the American mass media sought to cast his rule as illegitimate and dictatorial.

Evo Morales: Chavez is More Alive than Ever: here.

New WikiLeaks Cable Reveals US Embassy Strategy to Destabilize Chavez Government: here.

Related articles

• Venezuela Mourns the Death of Hugo Chavez (world.time.com)
• Rest In Paradise President Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías (themilitantnegro.com)