Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, the patriotic Venezuelan military officer and a sincere friend of Cuba and Fidel Castro Ruz, died on February 5th, thirteen years ago. On his anniversary, Latin American and Caribbean Dignity Day is celebrated, a day dedicated to the ideals of this faithful successor to the Liberator Simón Bolívar.
Commander Chávez was born in Sabaneta on July 28, 1954, and served as President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013. His socialist and integrationist ideas and principles, inherited from the thought of Simón Bolívar and Francisco de Miranda, made him the undisputed leader of the Bolivarian Revolution.
After leading a military rebellion on February 4, 1992, against the package of neoliberal economic measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and implemented by the Venezuelan president at the time, suffering two years in prison, and being released due to popular demand, on December 6, 1998, 56.24 percent of voters elected Chávez as Constitutional President of the then Republic of Venezuela.
In February 1999, Chávez assumed the presidency and convened a Constituent Assembly to draft a new Constitution in accordance with the new Venezuelan times. On August 9 of that same year, the National Constituent Assembly swore him in again as President of the Republic of Venezuela, and on December 15, 1999, the Venezuelan people approved the new Bolivarian Constitution by a majority vote in a referendum.
Thus, a democratic, participatory, and inclusive society was re-established, multiethnic and multicultural, framed within a decentralized state and a federal justice system that guarantees the right to life, work, culture, education, social justice, and equality without discrimination or subordination of any kind, in a close civic-military alliance to defend its sovereignty.
This event transformed Hugo Chávez Frías into the driving force behind a new historical cycle for Venezuela, and with him, the old power structures cracked, yielded, and ultimately collapsed; giving rise to popular organizations and alternative movements for change imbued with hopeful demands and unprecedented challenges, including economic blockades and aggressions of all kinds.
The new Constitution extended presidential terms to six years instead of the previous five, with each term beginning on January 10th of the year following the president's election. Based on the new foundations established in the constitutional text, general elections were held on July 30, 2000, in which, in addition to the Head of State, the population elected governors, mayors, and members of Parliament. With these elections, Chávez consolidated his political project and re-legitimized himself as President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela with 59.5 percent of the vote.
The Fifth Republic began in 2000, and with renewed momentum, the process of change in favor of the people and their support for the Caribbean expanded in the following years through integration mechanisms such as Petrocaribe.
The year 2002 was marked by the April 11th coup d'état, orchestrated by the Federation of Chambers and Associations of Commerce and Production of Venezuela, the corrupt Workers' Central Union, right-wing political parties, and military sectors opposed to the process of change, with the support of the US government. On April 13th, the people took to the streets to defend Chávez and reinstate him to power. This event forever defined one of the main strengths of the Bolivarian Government: the civic-military unity, which remains vigilant against the attempts by international capital and the national bourgeoisie to stifle and overthrow it.
In the following years, Chávez, along with Fidel Castro, fostered the creation of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-Peoples' Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP), later the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), and promoted South American integration projects with UNASUR and MERCOSUR.
In the presidential elections of December 3, 2006, Chávez was re-elected president with 62.84 percent of the vote. In October 2012, he won the presidential elections again, this time defeating the opposition coalition candidate with 55 percent of the vote.
The bond between Chávez and Cuba began even before he was elected president. His first visit was in December 1994, when Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Rafael Chávez had just been released from prison. In a courageous gesture, he accepted the invitation extended by the Historian of Havana, Eusebio Leal Spengler, arriving full of dreams and convictions, eager to begin building an unbreakable friendship. From the moment he set foot on the tarmac of José Martí International Airport, where Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro awaited him, he declared: "I do not deserve this honor; I aspire to deserve it someday in the months and years to come."
Throughout his presidency, relations between Venezuela and Cuba were a priority for the Chávez administration, strengthened through the signing of several agreements and conventions that helped establish a bilateral bridge between the two nations.
Hugo Chávez died at the age of 59 on March 5, 2013, at the Military Hospital of Venezuela, from cancer, which he had been battling since 2011. The announcement of his death by then-Vice President Nicolás Maduro Moros was met with great shock by the Venezuelan, Latin American, and Caribbean people, and messages of condolence poured in from around the world.
On March 15, 2013, after ten uninterrupted days of massive tributes at the lying-in-state at the Military Academy, the Venezuelan leader's coffin was transferred to the Mountain Barracks, the site of the 1992 civic-military rebellion that gave rise to the Bolivarian Revolution.