Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is dead at last. He was said to have been dead earlier, thereafter made what was reported to be a recovery and finally came home to die. His case was comparable to the death of Cuban caudillo Fidel Castro which was shrouded in rumour for days. Incidentally, Chavez went to Cuba for treatment. He was a hero to the majority of Venezuelans as well as to South America as a whole. He destroyed the old power elite in his country and could stand up to US pressure. But the US and much of Europe regarded him as a demagogue with authoritarian leanings. That is not a wholly correct assessment. He could cock a snook at Washington but drew together South America in the footsteps of Simon Bolivar. He played a key role in the South American search for unity. He admired Castro and supported nationalization of Venezuela’s oil sector. His funding of countries in South America endeared him to the international Left.
What he has left behind at home may be open to question. He brought millions of disenfranchised Venezuelans into the political process and built his power base, doing away with old power structures representing vested interests. But thereby, he built his own power structure based on a personality cult. As Castro’s system could not remove the fault lines of Batista’s, nor could Chavez’s. The wealth that came from the country’s huge oil reserves were frittered away or eaten up by corruption. Only a little of it went into developing the country’s infrastructure. No institutions have been created to promote his so-called cause of bettering the condition of the country’s poor. Finally, his death leads to a struggle for succession as in Cuba.