[Siberian Fox]

There is a discussion about Chávez in the Today's News forum, but I thought I'd post a proper obituary also:

Hugo Chávez obituary

Populist leader of Venezuela – a charismatic hero to the poor who denounced capitalism and persecuted his opponents

When Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez, who has died aged 58 after suffering from cancer, first appeared on Venezuelan television screens, on the morning of 4 February 1992, it was as an obscure army officer who had just tried – and failed – to overthrow the country's elected president, Carlos Andrés Pérez. Allowed to speak live to the nation, Chávez turned the public announcement of his surrender into a curious kind of victory, the fruits of which would only become fully apparent seven years later, when he entered the presidential palace as the country's elected leader.

The coup's objectives, he announced, were unobtainable "por ahora" (for now) – and that phrase, with its hint of what might be, would echo in the popular imagination, because politically, economically and socially the country was mired in crisis.

The man with the red paratrooper's beret and the camouflage fatigues had been born 38 years earlier in the small provincial town of Sabaneta, at the western edge of the vast plains – known as the llanos – that occupy much of the interior of Venezuela. His parents were both teachers by profession, but a passion for baseball led young Hugo to enrol in the military academy at the age of 17.

As a young officer, he became disillusioned with the armed forces and with the system they served. Corruption and human rights abuses, he later said, led him to sympathise more with the guerrillas he was supposed to combat in the mid-70s than with his own superiors, and he determined to form his own revolutionary organisation. His older brother Adán, a radical university professor, put him in touch with the guerrilla leaders with whom he would conspire for more than a decade before launching his uprising without them.

Several military bases were seized, but Chávez failed to take the presidential palace, and Pérez escaped. The plotters were sentenced to lengthy jail terms, but the president was later impeached and his eventual successor, Rafael Caldera, ordered the cases against them to be dropped.

Belatedly persuaded to take the electoral route, albeit for tactical reasons, Chávez stood for president with a promise to sweep aside the old order, rewrite the constitution and eliminate corruption. Riding a wave of disgust with politics, he won 56% of the vote and strode to power over the ruins of a 40-year-old, two-party system.

[...]

The debate continued as to whether Chávez could fairly be described as a dictator, but a democrat he most certainly was not. A hero to many, especially among the poor, for his populist social programmes, he assiduously fomented class hatred and used his control of the judiciary to persecute and jail his political opponents, many of whom were forced into exile.

Contemptuous of private property, he seized millions of hectares of farmland and scores of businesses large and small, often with little or no compensation. The result was an even more oil-dependent economy, which in place of the "endogenous development" promised by the revolution, relied on imports for basic foodstuffs once produced domestically.

Internationally, Chávez posed as an anti-imperialist and lavished aid on ideological allies. Venezuela would, he claimed, play a vital role in saving the planet from the evils of capitalism. In a notorious speech to the UN general assembly in 2006, he called US president George W Bush "the devil", claiming the podium still smelled of sulphur. It went down well in some quarters, but economic failure at home and the cosy relations he had enjoyed with dictators such as Robert Mugabe and Muammar Gaddafi would ultimately limit his appeal, even on the international left.

Chávez is survived by two ex-wives, Nancy Colmenares and Marisabel Rodríguez, and four children – Hugo Rafael, María Gabriela and Rosa Virginia by his first wife and Rosinés by his second.

• Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, soldier and politician, born 28 July 1954; died 5 March 2013

Full obituary.