The legacy of Hugo Chavez: part 4

Mr Chavez placed a great emphasis on providing financial and medical aid to the rest of Latin America, bolstered by the profits produced by the Venezuela oil industry. In the first eight months of 2007 alone, Venezuela spent $8.8 billion in doing so, something which was simply unprecedented for a Latin American country in terms of scale. In 2007 when Daniel Ortega was re-elected president in Nicaragua, Mr Chavez announced plans to aid the impoverished Central American country by forgiving the $30 million it owed Venezuela, and agreed to supply them with a further gift of $10 million in aid, as well as providing them with a $20-million loan with little or no interest and designed to benefit the country’s poor.  In September 2009, Mr Chavez along with allies in Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia, set up a regional bank and development lender called the Bank of the South, based in the Venezuelan capital city of Caracas with the aim of distancing the Latin American countries from the grips of the financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. He maintained that unlike other global financial organisations, the Bank of the South will be managed and funded by the countries of the region with the intention of funding social and economic development without any political conditions on that funding.
As much as president Hugo Chavez was a hero to millions of the downtrodden people in his country and elsewhere, and the anti-imperialist forces around the globe, he was equally despised by many powerful leaders of our time, let alone the members of the upper class in his own country. According to his biographers Marcano and Tyszka, Mr Chavez has ‘already earned his place in history as the president most loved and most despised by the Venezuelan people, the president who inspired the greatest zeal and the deepest revulsion at the same time.’