CARACAS, VENEZUELA –-(Ammoland.com)- Venezuela’s vice president announced that President Hugo Chavez died on Tuesday, ending 14 years of rule by the firebrand socialist but leaving his party firmly in control of the nation.
Vice President Nicolas Maduro said that Chavez died “after battling a tough illness for nearly two years.”
Chavez easily won a new six-year term at an election in October and his death will devastate millions of supporters who adored his charismatic style, anti-U.S. rhetoric and oil-financed policies that brought subsidized food and free health clinics to long-neglected slums.
Detractors, however, saw his one-man style, gleeful nationalizations and often harsh treatment of opponents as traits of an egotistical dictator whose misplaced statist economics wasted a historic bonanza of oil revenues.
Chavez’s death opens the way for a new election that will test whether his socialist “revolution” can live on without his dominant personality at the helm and sets up a presidential election to replace Chavez, whose illness prevented him from taking the oath of office for the term to which he was re-elected last year.
Under the constitution, the head of Congress, Diosdado Cabello, would assume the interim presidency.
The announcement came just hours after Maduro announced the government had expelled two U.S. diplomats from the country.
Maduro also said “we have no doubt” that Chavez’s cancer, which was first diagnosed in June 2011, was induced by foul play by “the historical enemies of our homeland.”
He compared the situation to the death of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, claiming Arafat was “inoculated with an illness.”
Chavez was a garrulous figurehead for a global “anti-imperialist” alliance stretching as far as Belarus and Iran, and he will be sorely missed by anti-U.S. agitators.