Hugo Chavez

Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías 28 July 1954 – 5 March 2013) was a Venezuelan politician and the President of Venezuela between 1999 and his death in 2013. He was the leader of the Fifth Republic Movement from its foundation in 1997 until 2007, when it merged with several other parties to form the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which he led until 2012.

Born into a working-class family in Sabaneta, Barinas, Chávez became a career military officer, and after becoming dissatisfied with the Venezuelan political system based on the Punto Fijo Pact,he founded the clandestine Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200 (MBR-200) in the early 1980s. Chávez led the MBR-200 in an unsuccessful coup d’état against the Democratic Action government of President Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1992, for which he was imprisoned. Released from prison after two years, he founded a political party known as the Fifth Republic Movement and was elected president of Venezuela in 1998. He was re-elected in 2000 and again in 2006 with over 60% of the vote. After winning his fourth term as president in the October 2012 presidential election, he was to be sworn in on 10 January 2013, but Venezuela’s National Assembly postponed the inauguration to allow him time to recover from medical treatment in Cuba.^[3] Suffering a return of the cancer originally diagnosed in June 2011, Chávez died in Caracas on 5 March 2013 at the age of 58.