Hugo Chávez

At 58 years old, Hugo Chávez has this physical status:

Hugo Rafael Chávez Frás (28 July 1954 – 5 March 2013) was a Venezuelan politician who served as president of Venezuela from 1999 to 2013.

Chávez was also the founder of the Fifth Republic Movement political party from 1997 to 2007, when it merged with several other groups to form the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which he led until 2012. Chávez, a middle-class man in Sabaneta, Barinas, became a career military officer and, after becoming dissatisfied with Venezuela's political system based on the Puntofijo Pact, formed the clandestine Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200 (MBR-200) in the early 1980s.

Chávez led the MBR-200 in a failed coup d'état against President Carlos Andrés Pérez's Democratic Action government in 1992, for which he was detained.

Pardoned from jail for two years, he founded the Fifth Republic Movement and was elected president of Venezuela in 1998 with 56.2 percent.

In 2000, he was re-elected with 58% of the vote and in 2006 with 68% of the vote.

With a decrease to 51% of the vote in October 2012, he was supposed to be sworn in on January 10, 2013.

Early life

Chávez was born in Barinas State on July 28th, 1954, in the residence of his paternal grandmother Rosa Inéz Chávez's house, a modest three-room house. The Chávez family was of Amerindian, Afro-Venezuelan, and Spanish descent. Hugo de los Reyes Chávez, a child of Colombia's detention center, and Elena Fras de Chávez, were schoolteachers who lived in Los Rastrojos, Argentina.

Hugo was the second child in his family's house. Chávez's childhood of ostensible poverty has been debated, although he may have changed the story of his origins for political reasons. Chávez, a student at the Julián Pino Elementary School, was particularly interested in the 19th-century federalist general Ezequiel Zamora, whose army his own great-grandfather had served in. Hugo and his older brother Adán, who lived in a lower middle class household subsidized house provided by the government, were sent to live with their grandmother Rosa, who lived in a lower middle class home where they attended Daniel O'Leary High School in the mid-1960s. Despite being paid for college for Chávez and his siblings, his father paid for college for him.

Personal life

Chávez has married twice. Nancy Colmenares (d. 2022), a woman from a poor family in Chávez's hometown of Sabaneta, was the first to marry him. Chávez and Colmenares were married for 18 years, during which they had three children: Rosa Virginia, Mara Gabriela, and Hugo Rafael, the last of whom suffers from behavioural problems. Soon after Chávez's 1992 coup attempt, the two families were divorced. Chávez had an affair with historian Herma Marksman during his first marriage; their relationship lasted nine years. Marisabel Rodrez de Chávez, Chávez's second wife, divorced in 2004 after separating in 2002 and 2004. Chávez had a second daughter, Rosinés, during their marriage. Both Mara and Rosa had children. Chávez was released from jail and began affairs with women who had been his followers. Chávez was also accused of being a womanizer in both his marriages, as well as ministers, journalists, and ministers' children. The allegations remained unproven and were contradicted by statements made by other figures close to him, though one former aide revealed that Chávez's marriage to Marisabel and afterwards, he was involved in liaisons with women and gave them gifts, though one of his aides said that some of the women bore children from Chávez.

Many who lived close to Chávez noticed that he had bipolar disorder. Chávez was bipolar, according to Salvador Navarrete, a physician who treated Chávez during his first years in the presidency. Chávez had "a tendency toward cyclothymia," according to Alberto Müller Rojas, then vice president of Chávez's Chávez's party, who described the movement as "a period of extreme excitement to moments of despondence." According to a different explanation, Chávez's use of such behaviour to criticize opponents and polarize was a tactic.

Chávez was a Catholic. At one time, he had intended to become a priest. He saw his socialist beliefs as having roots in Jesus Christ's (liberation theology) philosophy, and he often used the phrase "Christ is with the Revolution!" Although Chávez's religious convictions were often reserved, he became more open to discussing his religious convictions, claiming that he interpreted Jesus as a Communist. He was, in general, a liberal Catholic, although some of his statements were troubling to the Catholic Church of his country. He voiced reservations about an afterlife in 2008, claiming that such an assumption was false. Darwin's interpretation of evolution would also be revealed, with the assertion that "God created man from the ground" being a lie. Among other things, he cursed Israel, and he had some clashes with both the Venezuelan Catholic clergy and Protestant groups like the New Tribes Mission, whose evangelical leader he "condemned to hell." In addition, he performed syncretistic beliefs, such as the veneration of the Venezuelan goddess Mara Lionza. Chávez's last years, after he discovered he had cancer, became more attached to the Catholic Church.

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Military career

Chávez, a 17-year-old military officer, studied at the Venezuelan Academy of Military Sciences in Caracas, following a curriculum called the Andrés Bello Plan, which was developed by a coalition of progressive, nationalistic military officers. The students were encouraged to explore not only military tactics and tactics but also a slew of other topics, and to do so, civilian professors were brought in from other universities to give lectures to the military cadets.

He began to participate in sports outside of the military academy, including 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, as well as painting. After reading his book The Diary of Che Guevara, he became interested in the Marxist revolution Che Guevara (1928–67). He was selected to represent Peru's 150th anniversary of the Battle of Ayacucho, in which Simon Bolvar's lieutenant, Antonio José de Sucre, defeated royalist forces during the Peruvian War of Independence in 1974. Chávez heard General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1910–1977) debate why the military should act in the interests of the working classes when the ruling classes were viewed as corrupt.

Chávez, befriending Maximum Leader Omar Torrijos, Panama's leftist dictator, visited Panama, where he was impressed with his land reform initiative, which was meant to help the peasants. Torrijos and Velasco's influence saw the possibility for military generals to seize power of a government while the civilian authorities were seen as serving the interests of only the wealthy elites. "I became a Torrijos with Torrijos," Chávez later wrote. I became a Velasquist with Velasco. "I became an anti-Pinochetist" with Pinochet, and I became an anti-Pinochetist." Chávez graduated from the military academy in 1975 as one of the year's top graduates.

Chávez was posted as a communications officer at a counterinsurgency unit in Barinas following his graduation.

Chávez's unit was moved to Anzoátegui, where they were active in fighting the Red Flag Party, a Marxist-Hoxhaist rebel faction. Chávez began to doubt the army and their torture tactics after intervening to prevent the beating of an alleged rebel by other soldiers.

He founded the Venezuelan People's Liberation Army, or ELPV), in the hopes of bringing a leftist government to Venezuela one day. The Venezuelan People's Liberation Army (Ejércy del Pueblo de Venezuela, or ELPV), although they knew they wanted a middle way between the government's right-wing policies and the Red Flag's far-left position. Nevertheless, Chávez held clandestine discussions with several influential Marxists, including Alfredo Maneiro (the maker of the Radical Cause) and Douglas Bravo, in the hopes of strengthening ties with civilian leftist groups in Venezuela. Chávez married Nancy Colmenares, a working-class woman with three children, including Rosa Virginia (born September 1978), Mara Gabriela (born March 1980) and Hugo Rafael (born October 1983).

Chávez, five years after his creation of the ELPV, went on to found the Bolivarian Revolutionary Army-200 (EBR-200), which later renamed the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200. (MBR-200). Simón Bolvar (1783–1830), and Simón Rodr (1769–1854), who became known as the MBR-200's "three roots of the tree," were inspired by Ezequiel Zamora (1817-1830). MBR's early ideology, according to Irish political analyst Barry Cannon, was "a doctrine in construction, a heterogeneous collection of ideas and ideologies, from universal thought, capitalism, Marxism, but not opposing the neoliberal models introduced in Latin America and the old Soviet Bloc's discredited models."

He met Herma Marksman, a newly divorced history professor with whom he had an affair that lasted several years, in 1984. During this period, Francisco Arias Cárdenas, a soldier interested in liberation theology, was also a member of MBR-200.

After some time, some senior military officers became suspicious of Chávez and resigned him, ensuring that he would not be able to recruit any more new new recruits from the academy. He was sent by the emperor of Apure State to command the remote barracks.

Centrist Carlos Andrés Pérez (1922–2010) was elected president, but although he had promised to oppose the International Monetary Fund's policies, he introduced economic policies that were supported by the IMF, angering the public. Plan vila, a military contingency plan by the Venezuelan Army to maintain public order, was launched in an attempt to prevent widespread looting and demonstrations that followed his budget cuts, known as El Caracazo. Though Chávez's MBR-200 party reportedly took part in the crackdown, Chávez did not; he was hospitalized with chicken pox. He later described the event as "genocide."

Chávez began preparing for Operation Zamora, a military coup d'état. Members of the military overwhelmingly military and communications services were recruited and assassinated, with Rafael Caldera taking power after Pérez was captured and assassinated. Chávez postponed the MBR-200 coup, which had been planned for December, to the early twilight hours of 4 February 1992.

On the day of Chávez's command, five army units under Chávez's command entered urban Caracas. Despite years of planning, Chávez's coup quickly ran into difficulties, as Chávez commanded the respect of less than 10% of Venezuela's military. Chávez and a small group of rebels were unable to connect with other members of their team after numerous betrayals, defections, mistakes, and other unfortunate circumstances. Pérez was able to flee Miraflores Palace by using a slew of stairs. During the ensuing violence, thirteen soldiers were killed, fifty soldiers, and five eighty civilians were wounded.

Chávez apologised to the government and appeared on television in uniform to order that the remaining coup members lay down their arms. Chávez remarked in his address that they had failed only "por ahora" (for now). Venezuelans, particularly poor ones, began seeing him as someone who spoke out against government mismanagement and kleptocracy. The coup "flopped militarily" and thousands of people were killed—but Rory Carroll of The Guardian said it made him a media celebrity."

Chávez was arrested and detained at the San Carlos military jail, wracked with guilt and feeling blamed for the coup's demise. He was arrested and transferred to Yare Prison after attending Pro-Chávez protests outside San Carlos. In November, there was yet another unsuccessful coup attempt against the government, with the uprising following the deaths of at least 143 people and possibly more than 100. Pérez was jailed a year earlier, charged with mismanagement and misappropriating funds.

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