Phil Gunson The Guardian, Tuesday 5 March 2013 23.17 GMT
Populist leader of Venezuela – a charismatic hero to the poor who denounced capitalism and persecuted his opponents
Hugo Chávez speaking in September 2005 at the United Nations. On his return the following year, he complained of the smell of sulphur left on the podium by "the devil", President George W Bush. Photograph: TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images
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. His father, Hugo de los Reyes Chávez, was elected governor of their home state of Barinas.
An elected assembly, almost entirely composed of his supporters, produced a constitution – approved by referendum in December 1999 – that extended the presidential term to six years and allowed immediate re-election. The senate was abolished, the role of the armed forces expanded, and new "moral" and "electoral" branches of government created.
The country's name was changed to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in honour of the liberation hero Simón Bolívar, whose cause – betrayed, allegedly, by the "oligarchy" – Chávez claimed to have inherited. But the early results were inauspicious: the economy shrank by more than 7% in 1999, and, to make matters even worse, immediately after the constitutional referendum Venezuela was hit by catastrophic floods and landslides, which made tens of thousands homeless and left an unknown number of dead.
Fresh elections in 2000, under the new constitution, nonetheless consolidated Chávez's grip on power. The new parliament granted him sweeping powers, which he used to enact dozens of radical laws, drafted in secret and unveiled as a package in 2001, which divided the country.
But it was his attempt, in early 2002, to impose party control over the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, that sparked the revolt that came close to ousting him. On 11 April, after hundreds of thousands had marched on the presidential palace to force him out and a score of civilians, from both sides, had been shot dead in circumstances never fully explained, senior military officers turned against him. According to his loyalist general Lucas Rincón Romero, Chávez (who later admitted he had deliberately provoked the crisis) agreed to resign.
A lack of coherent leadership on the opposition side, and an attempt by hardline civilian and military figures to hijack the revolt, caused the collapse of the new regime after less than two days, and Chávez returned in triumph. Subsequent attempts to unseat him by shutting down the oil industry and – finally, after months of mediation by the Organisation of American States – through a recall referendum in mid-2004, also failed.
Chávez by now had sufficient grip on the country's institutions to be able to postpone the referendum (in violation of the constitutional rules) long enough for the rising price of oil to refloat his government. An astute intervention by Fidel Castro's Cuba led to the creation of the so-called "missions" – populist social programmes funded by oil money that would prove crucial in keeping Chávez in power in succeeding years.
The opposition cried fraud, but failed to present the evidence. Its decision, in October 2005, to boycott parliamentary elections on the same grounds marked the low point for anti-Chávez forces. With the entire legislature in his hands, along with the oil industry and the armed forces, the president was able to take full advantage of record export earnings, and in 2006 he was re-elected with an increased majority.
During his 1998 presidential campaign, Chávez had insisted that he was "neither of the left nor the right". But by 2006, he felt sufficiently secure to declare that socialism was the only way forward. Specifically, it was "21st-century socialism" – a vaguely defined hotchpotch of ideas filched from a variety of sources, whose only consistent ingredient was an ever greater concentration of power in the hands of one man.
The former lieutenant-colonel had always insisted that his revolution was "peaceful, but armed". After purging the armed forces of all those suspected of disloyalty to the leader, he obliged officers and troops to adopt the Cuban-inspired slogan "socialist motherland or death", and created a militia answerable only to him. Thuggish, armed civilian groups also swore to defend the revolution against enemies within and without. These included opponents in the media, the universities and the church.
Emboldened by his election victory, Chávez moved to close down RCTV, the country's oldest television channel and a determined opponent of his regime. A hitherto dormant student movement re-awoke, took to the streets and – though it failed to save RCTV – helped stave off a bid by the president to rewrite the constitution yet again, this time along overtly dictatorial lines.
Describing the opposition's victory in the 2007 constitutional referendum as "shit", Chávez revived his "por ahora" slogan and succeeded in rescuing the central plank of his proposed reform – indefinite presidential re-election – by putting it to a fresh referendum in early 2008. The opposition revival nonetheless continued, and in November that year it won control of several large states and the capital, Caracas. The president retaliated by stripping mayors and governors of many of their budgetary allocations.
He adopted a similar tactic in 2010 when, with the economy in recession, the opposition won around half the vote in parliamentary elections but – thanks to the abolition of proportional representation – ended up with 67 seats to the government's 98. Even this was too much for the president, who had the loyalists in the outgoing legislature grant him sweeping decree powers for the next 18 months, effectively bypassing parliament.
At the same time, a couple of dozen laws – rushed through parliament with minimal debate – completed the process of implementing the bulk of the constitutional reform rejected by the electorate in 2007. In particular, a package of five laws aimed at setting up a "communal state" threatened to render what remained of representative democracy in Venezuela a purely decorative matter.
In June 2011 Chavez gave a televised address from Cuba saying that he was recovering from an operation to remove a cancerous tumour. In July last year he declared himself fully recovered just three months before an election, which he won, securing himself another six years in office.
Last November and again in December he returned to Cuba for more cancer treatment. His allies took the winning 20 out of 23 governorships as favourable auguries for the continuation of Chávismo after his death. Last month he returned to Caracas.
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
