By Atilio Boron on July 28, 2018
He was the Grand Field Marshal discovered by Fidel after he was recently released from prison and nobody from the Latin American left-wing leadership gave him any credit. Fidel’s eagle eye allowed him to discern the greatness in this regional leader when the rest only saw in Chávez a frustrated coup plotter and one more military of the many who devastated Latin America. And Fidel was right and he became his Field Marshal in the crucial battle against the FTAA in Mar del Plata in November 2005; a battle that would mark a milestone in our long and unfinished march for the Second and Definitive Independence of Our America.
We have an immense continental debt to Chavez who reinstalled the issue of modern socialism when neoliberalism prevailed without counterweights in Our America. For him to have produced the awakening of the anti-imperialist sentiment that had been dormant for centuries in the region; to have rescued the centrality of the unity of our peoples and to have embodied in concrete institutions our American ideology the likes of ALBA, UNASUR, CELAC, Petrocaribe, Telesur, the Bank of the South, etc. It was for this reason that he became the Empire’s number one public enemy, something that definitively marks his universal appeal as opposed to the absolute indifference that the empire shows toward the innocuous vociferous ultra-left of Latin America, which made their visceral criticism and repudiation of Chávez the reason for their existence. He paid with his life for his concrete revolutionary daring, not of pure rhetoric like that of his misguided critics.
That is why Chavez was killed, as is gradually being confirmed by the complex puzzle of this hypothesis. It will not be long before we have concrete and definitive proof of this assassination, the intellectual authors of which we know where they live, we know the reasons for their vile decision and we also know that his death is part of a long series of popular leaders that the “serial killers” in Washington were responsible for completing in the five continents. Chávez, like Bolívar, will live eternally in the heart of our peoples. He was an extraordinary leader but, above all, a good person, an honest, transparent and deeply human man.
He was intelligent, and a faithful friend, endowed with a fine sense of humor; an insatiable and passionate reader to the point where only Fidel can be compared to him on this point. He was the owner of a fabulous memory capable of reciting poetry and singing non-stop until dawn; a man of the people, deeply of the people and capable as very few others in communicating with his people and understanding their experiences, their emotions and their needs. That is why Chávez was Chávez, and that is why Chávez is a people, in Venezuela and throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. In Our America, to say Chavez is to say people. His name has definitely entered through the big door of history. That is why today we remember his birthday and we only need to greet him with: Farewell, dear Commander!
https://www.elespectador.com/noticias/el-mundo/hugo-chavez-cumpliria-hoy-64-anos-articulo-802944
Source: teleSur Blog, translated by Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau