Hugo Chávez

Born into a middle-class family in Sabaneta, Barinas, Chávez became a military officer but grew dissatisfied with Venezuela's political system and founded the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200 in the early 1980s. He led an unsuccessful coup against President Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1992 and was imprisoned, then pardoned two years later. He founded the Fifth Republic Movement and won the presidency in 1998 with 56.2% of the vote, then reelection in 2000, 2006, and 2012 with escalating margins. Using record oil revenues, his government nationalized key industries and created social programs that temporarily reduced poverty between 2003 and 2007, but by 2010 he declared "economic war" on the upper classes as shortages mounted. His deficit spending and price controls proved unsustainable; by his death from cancer in Caracas on 5 March 2013, poverty, inflation, and shortages were rising, the murder rate had spiked, and the press was suppressed - yet his influence had already reshaped Latin America, anchoring a regional "pink tide" and leaving behind Chavismo, a political ideology that outlasted him.