Venezuela's Hugo Chavez dies: 5 ways to look at his legacy

Chavez won the lower classes' support by redistributing the nation's vast oil wealth through welfare programs called missions, which set up medical clinics and schools, operated a chain of cut-rate grocery stores, and divvied up nationalized farms and ranches among cooperatives of the impoverished.

Daniel Hellinger, a political science professor at Webster University in St. Louis, said the welfare programs reduced Venezuela's poverty rate from close to 80 percent in the 1990s to about 20 percent, and wiped out illiteracy.

"To millions of poor Venezuelans excluded from meaningful participation in politics, Chavez offered hope for a new kind of democracy that would open doors of government to them," Hellinger said. "However much the system fell short of that aspiration, it was Chavez who gave voice to it." [Los Angeles Times]

Like his mentor [Fidel] Castro, Chavez could captivate followers during six-hour improvised monologues during which he sang, toured socialist farming co-operatives, criticized ministers for inefficiency, and told stories about his days as a tank battalion leader. [Bloomberg]

His opponents seethed at the larger-than-life character who demonized them on television and ordered the expropriation of farms and businesses. Many in the middle class cringed at his bombast and complained about rising crime, soaring inflation, and government economic controls. [Associated Press]

At the same time, he was determined to hold on to and enhance his power. He grew obsessed with changing Venezuela's laws and regulations to ensure that he could be re-elected indefinitely and become, indeed, a caudillo, able to rule by decree at times. He celebrated his past as a military officer and stacked his government with generals, colonels, and majors, drawing inspiration from the leftist military officers who ruled Peru and Panama in the 1970s.

A bizarre governing apparatus subject to his whims coalesced around him. State television cameras recorded nearly every public appearance, many of them to make surprise, unscripted announcements, often in his military uniform and paratrooper's red beret. He might rail against Venezuela's high consumption of Scotch whisky — he did not drink alcohol, his aides said — or its high demand for breast augmentation surgery. He once stunned citizens by decreeing a new time zone for the nation, a half-hour behind its previous one. Fawning cabinet ministers sat through his televised lectures as he browbeat them over unfulfilled objectives. [New York Times]

Chavez never forgave the Americans. Thereafter, his anti-American rhetoric became more heated, and whenever possible he sought to discomfit Washington. Chavez closed U.S. military liaison offices in Venezuela, and ended cooperation with the Drug Enforcement Administration. Even earlier, in 2000, Chavez had flown to Baghdad for a friendly visit with Saddam Hussein. Later on, in his avowed ambition to weaken the U.S. imperio and create a "multipolar world," he would go on to embrace others with similarly anti-American stances: Iran's Ahmadinejad was one, Belarus's Lukashenko was another. He invited Vladimir Putin to send his navy to do exercises in Venezuelan waters, and to sell him weapons. And there was his increasingly chummy, and dependent, relationship with Fidel Castro. [New Yorker]

In the region, it was not Venezuela but Brazil, finally emergent from its slumber as a regional economic and political powerhouse, that began to fill that vacuum. Brazil's last leader, Lula, who was also a left-wing populist, also made "the people" and poverty alleviation a priority of his administration, and, with a better management team and without all the polarizing confrontation with the imperio, he succeeded to an impressive degree. [New Yorker]