Hugo Chavez: A Revolutionary's Life
Updated: 9:14am UK, Wednesday 06 March 2013
Hugo Rafael Chavez Frias was born on July 28, 1954, in the rural town of Sabaneta in western Venezuela. He was the son of schoolteachers and the second of six brothers.
He was raised by his grandmother in a home with a dirt floor, mud walls and a roof made of palm fronds. As a boy he was a fine baseball player and hoped he might one day play in the US major leagues.
But when he joined the military aged 17 the young soldier immersed himself in the history of 19th century independence leader Simon Bolivar and other Venezuelan heroes who had overthrown the Spanish rule.
His political ideas began to take shape and the baseball dream was forgotten - although he remained a lifelong fan of the game.
Chavez first burst into public view in 1992 as a paratrooper commander leading a military rebellion that brought tanks to the presidential palace.
When the coup collapsed, Chavez was allowed to make a televised statement in which he declared his movement had failed "for now". The speech, and those two defiant words, launched his career, sealing his defiant image into the memory of Venezuelans.
Two years later, he and other coup leaders were released from prison, and President Rafael Caldera dropped the charges against them.
After establishing a new political party, Chavez ran for president in 1998, pledging to clean up Venezuela's entrenched corruption and shatter its traditional two-party system. At the age of 44, he became the country's youngest president, winning 56% of the vote.
Soon after he took office on February 2, 1999, Chavez and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela party pushed through a new constitution, which included lengthening presidential terms from five years to six and changing the country's name to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
By 2000, his increasingly confrontational style and close ties to Cuba disenchanted many of the middle-class supporters who voted for him, and the following years saw bold attempts by opponents to dislodge him from power.
In 2002, he survived a short-lived coup, which began after large anti-Chavez street protests ended in shootings and bloodshed. Dissident military officers detained the president and announced he had resigned. But within two days, he returned to power with the help of military loyalists amid massive protests by his supporters.
Emerging a stronger president, he went on to defeat an opposition-led strike that paralysed the country's oil industry and fired thousands of state oil company employees.
The coup also turned Chavez more decidedly against the US government, which had recognised the provisional leader who briefly replaced him. He created political and trade alliances that excluded the US and strengthened ties to Iran and Syria - largely, it seemed, due to their shared antagonism toward the US.
After easily winning re-election in 2006, Chavez began calling for a "multi-polar world" free of US domination. He boosted oil shipments to China, set up joint factories with Iran to produce tractors and cars, and sealed arms deals with Russia for assault rifles, helicopters and fighter jets. He focused on building alliances throughout Latin America and injected new energy into the region's left. Allies were elected in Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and other countries.
All the while, Chavez emphasised that it was necessary to prepare for any potential conflict with the "empire", his term for the US.
Running a revolution ultimately left little time for a personal life. His second marriage, to journalist Marisabel Rodriguez, deteriorated in the early years of his presidency, and they divorced in 2004. In addition to their one daughter, Rosines, Chavez had three children from his first marriage, which ended before he ran for office. His daughters Maria and Rosa often appeared at his side at official events and during his trips. He had one son, Hugo Rafael Chavez.
After he was diagnosed with cancer in June 2011, he acknowledged that he had recklessly neglected his health. He had taken to staying up late and drinking as many as 40 cups of coffee a day.
Even as he appeared with head shaved while undergoing chemotherapy, he never revealed the type of cancer he had or precisely where tumours were removed from his pelvic region.
Chavez exerted himself for one final election campaign in 2012 after saying tests showed he was cancer-free, and defeated younger challenger Henrique Capriles. With another six-year term in hand, he promised to keep pressing for revolutionary changes.
But two months later, he went to Cuba for cancer-related surgery for the fourth time, blowing a kiss to his country as he boarded the plane.
After a 10-week absence, the government announced that Chavez had returned to Venezuela and was being treated at a military hospital in Caracas. He was never seen again in public. He died aged 58.
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