14 DAY TRIAL // Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela and one of the most polarizing political figures on the international scene in years, has died. He had not been seen in public since last December.
He had been battling cancer.
For the past week, reports of his worsening health condition had been steadily emerging in the press, with heartbroken Venezuelans praying for him to make a turnaround. It never happened.
News of Chavez’s death has been confirmed by Vice President Nicolas Maduro, CNN informs.
In brief statements after the President’s passing, he and other political figures have urged the people not to lose hope, and to continue striving for peace and stability.
“We must unite now more than ever,” Maduro said.
“This is not the time for difference. It is the time for unity. It is the time for peace,” opposition leader Henrique Capriles Radonski chimed in.
Known for his eloquence on topics ranging from politics to environmental issues and the “devil” that came under the guise of anything US-branded, Chavez was loved by the people but controversial on the international political scene.
His attacks against the US became, in his later years, more debated than any other of his speeches, and the explanation for that could be found in the fact that he used to refer to George W. Bush as “the Devil” or muse out loud whether cancer had not been invented in this country.
“Would it be strange if (the United States) had developed a technology to induce cancer, and for no one to know it?” he said just last year, after he had been diagnosed with the disease.
All these oddities aside, Chavez never lost hope in the people he led, always thinking of ways of making the lives of the poor a bit more bearable through various social campaigns that were harshly criticized by the opposition.
“After many readings, debates, discussions, travels around the world, etcetera, I am convinced -- and I believe this conviction will be for the rest of my life – that the path to a new, better and possible world is not capitalism. The path is socialism,” he said in 2005.
Hugo Chavez was just 58 years old.