CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela died Tuesday afternoon after a long battle with cancer, the government announced, leaving behind a bitterly divided nation in the grip of a political crisis that grew more acute as he languished for weeks, silent and out of sight in hospitals in Havana and Caracas.
With his voice cracking and close to tears, Vice President Nicolas Maduro said he and other officials had gone to the military hospital where Chavez was being treated, sequestered from the public, when “we received the hardest and most tragic information that we could transmit to our people.”
Within short order, police officers and soldiers were highly visible as people ran through the streets, calling loved ones on cell phones, rushing to get home. The capital quickly became an enormous traffic jam. Stores and shopping malls abruptly closed. As dark fell, government television showed a muted crowd congregating in the main square of Caracas, some people crying.
Chavez supporters set fire to tents and mattresses used by university students who had chained themselves together in protest several days ago to demand more information about Chavez’s condition.
“Are you happy now?” the Chavez supporters shouted as they ran through the streets with sticks. “Chavez is dead! You got what you wanted!”
Chavez’s departure from a country he dominated for 14 years puts in doubt the future of his socialist revolution. It alters the political balance in Venezuela, the fourth-largest foreign oil supplier to the United States, and in Latin America, where Chavez led a group of nations intent on reducing U.S. influence in the region.
Chavez, 58, left Venezuela deeply polarized, his supporters lionizing him as a courageous rebel determined to take on the elites, and his foes painting him as a dangerous demagogue and strongman.
A teary-eyed Bolivian President Evo Morales, one of Chavez’s closest allies and most loyal disciples, declared that “Chavez is more alive than ever.”
Relations with the United States were strained under Chavez.
President Barack Obama issued a statement saying that the United States reaffirms its support for the “Venezuelan people and its interest in developing a constructive relationship with the Venezuelan government.”
The Venezuelan Constitution says the nation should “proceed to a new election” within 30 days when a president dies in the first four years of his term, and Foreign Minister Elias Jaua said in a television interview that Maduro would take the helm in the meantime. The election itself is likely to pit Maduro, whom Chavez designated as his political successor, against Henrique Capriles, a young state governor who lost to Chavez in a presidential election in October.
But there has been heated debate in recent months over clashing interpretations of the constitution, in light of Chavez’s illness, and it is impossible to predict how the post-Chavez transition will proceed.
Only hours earlier, the government seemed to go into a state of heightened alert as Maduro convened a crisis meeting in Caracas of Cabinet ministers, governors loyal to the president and top military commanders.
Maduro warned in a lengthy televised speech that the United States was seeking to destabilize the country. He said the government had expelled two U.S. military attaches, accusing one of seeking to recruit Venezuelan military personnel. He called on Venezuelans to unite as he raised the specter of foreign intervention.
During his speech Tuesday, Maduro said the government suspected that the president’s enemies had found a way to cause his cancer, a possibility that Chavez had once raised. Maduro said scientists should investigate the source of his illness.
Chavez long accused the U.S. of trying to undermine or even assassinate him; indeed, the George W. Bush administration gave tacit support for a coup that briefly removed him from power in 2002. He often used Washington as a foil to build support or distract attention from deeply rooted problems at home, like high inflation and soaring crime.
“We completely reject the Venezuelan government’s claim that the United States is involved in any type of conspiracy to destabilize the Venezuelan government,” Patrick Ventrell, a State Department spokesman, said after the expulsion of the U.S. attaches. “Notwithstanding the significant differences between our governments, we continue to believe it is important to seek a functional and more productive relationship with Venezuela.”
Chavez was given a diagnosis of cancer in June 2011,but throughout his treatment he kept many details about his illness secret, refusing to say what kind of cancer he had or where in his body it occurred.
He had three operations from June 2011 to February 2012, as well as chemotherapy and radiation treatment, but the cancer kept returning. The surgery and most other treatments were done in Cuba.
Then Dec. 8, just two months after winning re-election, Chavez stunned the nation by announcing in a somber televised address that he needed yet another surgery.
That operation, his fourth, took place in Havana on Dec. 11. In the aftermath, grim-faced aides described the procedure as complex and said his condition was delicate. They eventually notified the country of complications, first bleeding and then a severe lung infection and difficulty breathing.
After previous operations, Chavez often appeared on television while recuperating in Havana, posted messages on Twitter or was heard on telephone calls made to television programs on a government station. But after his December surgery, he was not seen again in public, and his voice fell silent.
Chavez’s aides eventually announced that a tube had been inserted in his trachea to help his breathing and that, as a result, he had difficulty speaking. It was the ultimate paradox for a man who seemed never at a loss for words, often improvising for hours at a time on television, haranguing, singing, lecturing, reciting poetry and orating.
As the weeks dragged on, officials in Chavez’s government worked to project an image of business as usual and deflected inevitable questions about a power vacuum at the top. At the same time, the country struggled with an outof-balance economy, troubled by soaring prices and escalating shortages of basic goods.
The opposition, weakened after defeats in the presidential election in October and elections for governor in December, in which its candidates lost in 20 of 23 states, sought to keep pressure on the government.
Then officials suddenly announced Feb. 18 that Chavez had returned to Caracas. Hearrived unseen on a pre-dawn flight and was installed in a military hospital, where he was continuing treatments, aides said.
As an obscure 37-year-old lieutenant colonel, Chavez had led a failed coup in 1992 against President Carlos Andres Perez’s government. Six years later, on Dec. 6, 1998, Chavez was elected president in a landslide after pledging to replace a broken, corrupt political system and to redistribute the country’s substantial oil-fueled wealth.
The former army paratrooper promised a revolution and reveled in what he considered a battle to end all vestiges of the power structure then in place in Venezuela, especially its close economic and political ties to the United States.
His guiding light was the 19th-century independence liberator Simon Bolivar, whose pronouncements, writings and philosophy found their way into nearly every speech Chavez gave.
Chavez was able to marshal public backing for a series of referendums that created a new constitution and permitted him to put every important institution - from the legislature to the state oil company- under his control.
He criticized the U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and, in a speech at the United Nations in 2006, said President George W. Bush was “the devil.”
Chavez sought out relationships with assorted rebel groups, rogues and pariah governments. He exchanged letters with Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a Venezuelan-born terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, who was held in a French prison. He asserted that Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya was a model of participatory democracy.
Closer to home, Chavez expressed affinity for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a potent guerrilla group fighting Colombia’s U.S.-friendly government. His closest aides built a close relationship with the group’s commanders, according to Colombian officials, rebel documents seized in army raids and former rebels.
Chavez particularly irked the United States by building a close alliance with Iran and Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba, which found in Venezuela a deep-pocketed benefactor to replace the one the communist island lost with the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The president also advanced on what he called 21st-century socialism, which included the nationalization of hundreds of companies, the seizure of large land holdings, price controls and currency regulations. In speeches blaming capitalism for society’s ills, Chavez said his policies had made Venezuela a more prosperous country, independent of U.S. meddling and influence.
But throughout his presidency, Venezuela’s economy was plagued by blackouts, food shortages and a lack of investment, as government interventions, from price controls to the seizures of land and companies, squelched private enterprise.
A series of measures giving the state more control over the economy led to mounting protests in 2002 that culminated with Chavez’s ouster on April 11 after about 20 people were killed in the midst of a march near the presidential palace.
The Bush White Housepublicly welcomed his removal, saying that Chavez’s heavyhanded governing style had led to his own undoing. But Latin American leaders called it a coup and demanded the president’s return.
Chavez returned to power 48 hours after being forced to leave the presidential palace, put back in place by a loyal military unit and thousands of poor barrio dwellers who had flooded the city demanding his return.
Fully in control by late in the decade, Chavez became increasingly aggressive against his detractors. Opposition leaders were forced to flee the country, some were arrested after openly criticizing the president, and the government yanked the broadcast license of a television network, RCTV, that had been sharply critical of his governing style. The state also created a vast propaganda apparatus, made up of a half-dozen television stations,newspapers and community radio outlets, which offered endless praise of government initiatives.
Information for this article was contributed by William Neuman, Maria Eugenia Diaz, Girish Gupta, Meridith Kohut, Maria Iguaran, David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker of The New York Times; by Peter Orsi, Ron Depasquale, Christine Armario and Mark Stevenson of The Associated Press; and by Juan Forero of The Washington Post.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/06/2013