SABC News Online
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Chavez won a landslide re-election victory yesterday - Reuters
December 04, 2006, 06:30
Few leaders on the world stage have a polarised opinion as sharply as Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's president, who won a landslide re-election victory yesterday.
Devotees see the charismatic leftist as an advocate of the developing world against the overweening might of the United States, praising him for pouring petrodollars into clinics and schools for Venezuela's long-neglected poor majority.
His enemies view him as a dictator in the making, using his popular mandate to forge a Cuban-style one-party state in which every soldier and oil industry employee must be loyal to the values of his self-styled socialist revolution.
A highly unorthodox politician, Chavez uses marathon speeches to mix politics and oil with musings on recipes for hotdog sauces and baseball statistics.
Chavez fired people as a soccer referee
In his most extreme blend of theatre and politics, he dismissed seven senior managers of the state oil company PDVSA by pretending to be a soccer referee, firing the executives with blasts of his whistle.
Chavez first seized the limelight in 1992 when, as a young paratrooper officer, he led a failed coup. He forged his reputation in a television interview before he was jailed for his putsch attempt, saying his leadership ambitions were only over "for now." He was released in 1994.
The son of teachers from the western cattle ranching state of Barinas, Chavez joined the army at 16 to hone his skills as a baseball pitcher. His humble roots and vernacular chitchat have won him massive popular appeal.
He won a landslide presidential election in 1998 and pulled it off again in 2000. He also resoundingly won a recall referendum in 2004. Since then his revolution has picked up steam, with the confiscation of land and private firms, oil nationalisation and higher taxes on foreign companies tapping mineral resources. - Reuters