Gonna be a rough ride for Venezuela for the next little while....Chavez built the state institutions around him, not the party, so I think the transition is going to be very messy.

It's been rough enough for the past decade and a half. Hopefully this will lead to a new age for Venezuela, and cool heads will triumph over the idiots that will be straining at the leash to grab power

Murdered

There's going to be countless idiots straining for power...the man was the state and ain't no one that is going to be able to step in and assume that role.

I thougt he had been sick for awhile now with a form of cancer.

Read about the CIA experimentation with cancer cells and particularly a conference from the late 80s about making a gun that fires soluble darts at a target to induce the effects of heart attack. Not saying that's what happened, but it's certainly within the realms of probability, given the amount of times they tried to kill Castro

As a Venezuelan, I can say that CIA murder claims are simply ridiculous. He got cancer because he led a lifestyle full of risk enhancers. Roids, power shots, etc were commonly used by the president all the time. And the turmoil that will undoubtedly come will be better than to continue living under a dictator.

Even if you agree with all the socialist mumbo-jumbo that Chavez did during his long time in power, he did an immense disservice to his country by not building independent institutions to carry out his revolution without him. At the very least he should have not run again and had his anointed successor Maduro win the 2012 election. It was obvious Chavez would not serve out his term even if it wasn't obvious he would die so soon. Now Venezuela is set for a potentially lengthy period of instability and infighting, all because a caudillo couldn't just go into semi-retirement.

As an interesting fact, Chavez spent enough money during his tenure to fund over three Marshall plans, and left the country in a worse economic position than when he took over. Talk about being wasteful. One Marshall plan reconstructed Europe and three cannot even sustain one nation...

And that is considering inflation.

Chavez is dead? YIPEE!!!!

Pics or it didn't happen

Everyone dies.

Everybody knows that everybody dies, but not every day. Not today. Some days are special. Some days are so, so blessed. Some days, nobody dies at all. Now and then, every once in a very long while, every day in a million days, when the wind stands fair and the Doctor comes to call, everybody lives.

You're gonna die.

The guy who wrote that shit is gonna die.

Kestas is gonna die.

RIP Justin Bieber

maybe he wasnt the greatest guy in history but compared to what. there are other south american countries that are probably even worse than venezuela. and think about all the money spent on covert actions to destroy the country. when you are outside of fractional reserve banking you bring the full power of the united states against you as the american government is a puppet regime of the banking establishment.

when the richest people either want your country to become north korea or for a coup to force a fractional reserve bank on the country, just having people surviving is an accomplishment.

Kestas cant die. your a heratic.

Kestas will live on forever through his open-source software creation.

guak is obviously a fucking idiot, Chavez wasn't a dictator and it is nonsensical to seriously throw that charge at him.

It is pretty much universally agreed that Chavez was one of the better world leaders. He will be missed not just by Venezuela but by all of South America, to whom he was the Tito binding SA socialism together.

No it isn't. Chavez was a divide and rule leader who took the distrust and class difficulties that already existed in Venezuela and turned them into a stinking pit of vemon worse than almost anything I'd seen. He squandered the vast revenues given to him by oil on ego boosting projects so he could play a big man on the world stage. He ploughed millions into arming the militias because he was ex-army and couldn't resist playing soldiers. He missmanaged the economy so that what should have been an unprecendented golden age for Venezuela instead saw some of the poorest growth in the region.

When you look at the rule of Chavez it is hard to see much more than fear, intimidation, and a huge wasted opportunity.

I think it was pretty much agreed that a good chunk of Chavez's rise was luck, coming to power at a time when oil revenues in Venezuela were skyrocketing. He nationalized those revenues, and used them, if not wisely, at least shrewdly for his own political interest, shoring up his own base of power and support. Certainly some of the projects he undertook were good for some of the people, at least in the short-term. Late in his career, the revenues proved insufficient to support both critial long-term projects and the populistic program he had initiated for the purposes of his own career, and it was here that he put his career ahead of the national interest. He borrowed too much, and used the money not to advance infrastructure projects that would pay long-term dividends, but for short-term social programs and untenable fuel subsidies. As a result, the next president will have some very hard choices to make between deep social spending cuts to modernize the country's systems or mortgaging the country's future to build political capital.
In the end, I think Chavez will be remembered as a shrewdly self-interested politician, not as a national hero.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-unsure-if-hes-supposed-to-want-hugo-chave,31534/