Alexander Reed Kelly: Truthdigger of the Week, Hugo Chavez.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez died Wednesday. He was 58. For two years, an unspecified cancer in his lower body resisted surgery and treatment, and ultimately carried him away from the people who came to love him during his 14 year rule. Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara wrote, the day after Chavez's death, the president earned the love of Venezuelans at home, and leftists across the world, for combining "the fiery rhetoric of Italian fascism" with the egalitarian priorities of Scandinavian socialism. The progressive social and economic policies he instituted from his election in 1999 onward, inspired the business class that he was successfully tethering to plot his death or disappearance. In 2002, an American supported attempt to oust Chavez failed. Afterward, the privately owned media in the United States and Venezuela relentlessly sought to portray him as a dictator. What were his achievements? One of Chavez's first acts was to nationalize Venezuela's oil industry. Before Chavez, the oil supply was privately owned. A small class of monopoly holding elites, sold the oil to the United States at low cost, and took the profits for themselves. Chavez immediately raised the prices, and sold the oil to the United States at low cost, and took the profits for themselves. Chavez immediately raised the prices, and sold the oil directly to purchasing countries. As he explained in an interview with "Democracy Now", this eliminated the speculators in the middle, and allowed Venezuela to provide Latin America and Caribbean countries with cheap fuel. Chavez used Venezuela's oil profits to end illiteracy, provide elementary high school and college education, help poor mothers cover the cost of raising their families, expand and increase retirement benefits, provide neighborhood doctors to all communities, and launch massive housing construction programs. He cut poverty in half, and reduced extreme poverty by two thirds. Venezuela was transformed from the most unequal country in Latin America to the least. Democracy thrived as well. More than 30,000 newly created neighborhood councils gave members of the public the means to have their wants and needs heard. In 2005, Chavez declared himself a socialist, but not in the authoritarian mold of the Soviet Union under Stalin. He vowed his commitment to a socialism that was participatory and fully democratic. The political variety would exist alongside the economic kind.