Guardian obituary hugo chavez biography

Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s populist president, has died in a Caracas hospital after a nearly two-year battle with cancer.

Chavez had checked into the hospital on February 18 for a course of chemotherapy after spending two months in Cuba, where in December he had undergone his fourth round of cancer surgery since June 2011.

Born on July 28, 1954 in a rural town called Sabaneta, Chavez was the son of school teachers.

At the age of 17, he went to the Venezuelan Academy of Military Sciences in the capital and served as an army officer.

He always dreamed of being a baseball player in his youth.

However, while in the city, he rapidly acquired a taste for life in the military service.

“By the time I dressed in blue for the first time, I already felt like a soldier,” he once said, according to his biographers Christina Marcano and Alberto Barrera, who penned the book Hugo Chavez Without Uniform.

When he finished his studies in 1975, Chavez was deployed to the