Chavez founded the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement (MRB) in 1982 and the Fifth **** and Nation Movement (MNV) in 1997, and in December 1998 he ran for president as the presidential candidate of the left-wing electoral coalition, the Patriotic Center. "In December 1998, Chávez ran as the presidential candidate of the left-wing electoral alliance Centro Patriótico (Patriotic Center) and was elected president, taking office in February 1999. In July 2000, Chávez was reelected to the presidency in a new election held under Venezuela's new constitution. In October 2012, Chávez was re-elected to a second term in the presidential elections, but on December 11, 2012, he underwent surgery in the Cuban capital of Havana due to a recurrence of cancer in his body. Early career (1954-1992) Chávez Chavez was born on July 28, 1954, in Sabaneta, Barinas. Both his parents were school teachers and he was the second son. He is of mixed Indian, African, and Spanish descent. Chavez and five other siblings grew up in a thatched cottage near Sabaneta. At a young age, Chávez, along with his older brother, was sent to live with their grandmother in Sabaneta, where Chávez learned talents such as painting, singing, and baseball, while also attending the local Julián Pino Elementary School. He was later sent to the town of Barinas to attend the Daniel Florencio O'Leary High School, where he graduated with a diploma in science.
When Chávez was 17, he enrolled in the Venezuelan military academy, where he earned a master's degree in military science and engineering in 1975, and after a few months of military service as a reserve lieutenant, Chávez was authorized to study political science at the Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, but did not receive a diploma.
After completing his studies, Chavez entered full military service as a member of the anti-insurgency brigade based in the state of Barinas. Chavez's military career spanned 17 years, during which time he held a variety of positions, command, and staff positions before finally being promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Chavez also served as a faculty member and staff member at the Venezuelan Military Academy, where he was best known for his passionate teaching style and often strong criticism of the Venezuelan government and society at the time. During this time, Chavez also founded the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement-200 organization. Chavez went on to rise to a number of high-ranking positions and was awarded several medals. As Venezuela's economy continued to languish under President Carlos Andrés Pérez and popular discontent continued to grow, Chávez made extensive preparations for a military coup. Originally scheduled for December 1991, the coup was postponed until the morning of February 4, 1992, when it was finally launched. In the plan, five battalions of armed forces under Chávez's command were to enter the city of Caracas and attack and occupy the city's main military and communications installations, including the presidential residence, the defense headquarters, the military airport, and the historical museum. Chavez's ultimate goal is to capture incumbent President Perez.
After the failed coup, Chavez turned himself in to the government. He was allowed to appear on national television broadcasts to call for a cease-fire from the remaining rebel forces, and when he did, he famously sarcastically said he had only failed 'temporarily' (por ahora). Chávez became the center of national attention, and many poor Venezuelans saw him as a heroic figure in the fight against government graft and corruption. Chavez was sent to prison to serve his sentence, and President Perez, the target of the coup, was impeached a year later. While in prison, Chavez developed bulges in his eyes, which later grew into his irises. His vision gradually deteriorated, and despite numerous treatments and surgeries, Chavez's vision was permanently diminished. After two years of imprisonment, Chávez was pardoned by President Rafael Caldera in 1994. Upon his release, Chávez reorganized the MBR-200 into the new Fifth **** and Movement (MVR-Movimiento Quinta República, the V stands for the Roman numeral for five). By 1998, Chávez was running for president. Chávez based his political views on what he called Bolivarianism, and Chávez and his followers stated that their goal was to replace the existing system by "laying the foundations of a new **** and nation," arguing that the current tradition of a two-party system was nothing more than a system for dividing up the political spoils. Controversially, two of Venezuela's largest foreign banks - Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) and Banco Santander Central Hispano (BSCH) - illegally financed millions of dollars of Chávez's money during the election campaign. Chavez millions of dollars.
Chavez used his charismatic leadership and flamboyant oratorical style - with heavy use of colloquialisms and foul language - to win the support of Venezuela's large poor and working-class population. By May 1998, Chávez had risen to 30 percent in the polls, and by August had surged to 39 percent. Chavez finally won the December 6, 1998 election with 56% of the vote and was elected the 53rd President of Venezuela. Chávez embarked on a wide-ranging regime shift once he assumed the presidency in 1999. Venezuelan society under Chávez's rule has rapidly shifted from the free market economy and neoliberal principles adopted by the old government to quasi-socialist income redistribution and social welfare programs. Chavez has also completely reversed the tradition of foreign policy, severing the strategic links of interest with the United States and Europe in favor of an off-the-beaten-path foreign policy, which has become a model for the development and integration of the world in the southern hemisphere.
Chavez's reforms have been met with both praise and criticism. Many Venezuelans have also turned against him, especially the upper and upper-middle classes of society, and he has been exposed for many widespread political repressions and human rights abuses. The great controversy over Chavez's policies also led to a short-lived coup attempt to overthrow him in 2002, and a recall vote in 2004, and there have been many conspiracy theories that foreign powers have attempted to overthrow Chavez through military coups and assassinations, or even military invasions.
Economic crisis and a new constitution
Chavez was sworn in on February 2, 1999, and took office. In his first months, Chavez focused primarily on new legislation and constitutional reforms to abolish the old political system. A second focus was the immediate allocation of more government funds to aid new social programs.
Chavez's economic policy is quite different from that of previous rulers, stopping the continued privatization of Venezuela's state-owned shares - such as those in the social security system, the aluminum industry and the oil industry. However, while Chavez wants to promote the redistribution of wealth, increased regulation and social spending, he is not opposed to foreign direct investment in Venezuela. In common with previous presidents, Chavez has tried to attract an influx of foreign direct investment to avoid plunging the economy into a crisis of capital flight and inflation.
Chavez has also lowered Venezuela's oil extraction to get a higher price for oil, which would at least theoretically boost oil revenues as a way of boosting Venezuela's severely shrinking foreign exchange reserves. He also lobbied hard for other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to reduce oil production. As a result of these interventions in the oil industry and the OPEC, Chavez has been given the nickname "price cheater". Chavez also tried to renegotiate the 60-year royalty contracts that Venezuela had signed with Philips Petroleum and ExxonMobil before he came to power, which allowed the foreign oil companies to earn tens of billions of dollars a year from the vast amounts of oil Venezuela pumps, while paying only about 1 percent in taxes to the Venezuelan government. Chavez later said his aim was to completely nationalize Venezuela's oil resources. Although renegotiations with foreign oil companies have not been successful, Chavez has focused on improving the efficiency of the country's tax and accounting system, especially for major companies and landowners.
By mid-1999, however, Chavez's originally promised anti-poverty bill was blocked by opposition legislators in the National Assembly, and a furious Chavez announced that two more national elections would be held in July 1999-just one month before the previous presidential election. The first will be a national referendum on whether to hold a national constituent assembly that will adopt a framework similar to Chavez's political ideology as Venezuela's new constitution. The second election was to elect delegates to this constituent assembly. The referendum on the constitution passed with 72 percent approval, and in the second election the Polo Patriotico, a coalition of Chavez's Fifth **** and the Movement and other coalition parties, won 95 percent (120 out of 131) of the seats in the Constituent Assembly.
By August 1999, the Constituent Assembly had created a special "Emergency Judicial Commission," which had the power to exclude judges without consulting the other branches of government - and ended up suspending more than 190 judges on corruption charges. In the same month, the Constituent Assembly declared a "legislative emergency," in which a seven-member commission replaced the legislative functions normally performed by the National Assembly, immediately paralyzing the legislature's resistance to Chavez's policies, and forbidding the Assembly to meet in any form.
The Constituent Assembly itself designed the new 1999 Venezuelan constitution, one of the world's longest at 350 articles. It also changed the country's official name from the original Venezuela*** and the State to the Bolivarian*** and the State of Venezuela. The new constitution increases the term of office of the president from five to six years, increases the term limit from one to two terms, and establishes a national referendum for the removal of the president - meaning that the Venezuelan people will be able to remove the president from office early by means of a referendum. Such a referendum must be initiated by a certain number of signatures. The new Constitution also gives the President the power to dissolve the National Assembly, which increases the President's powers significantly. The new constitution transformed the bicameral National Assembly into a unicameral legislature, and the new legislature became much less powerful. The new constitutional provisions created a new position, the Defensor del Pueblo, which has the power to oversee the actions of the president, the National Assembly, and the constitution, and which Chávez described as the "morality branch" of the new government, charged with defending the public and moral interests. Finally, Venezuela's judicial system has been reformed, and under the new constitution, judges must pass a public **** test to take office, instead of just being appointed by the National Assembly, as was generally the case before.
The new constitution was adopted in national elections in December 1999, and the Constituent Assembly structured it exactly as Chávez intended. Chávez has argued that such changes are absolutely necessary for the successful and wide-ranging implementation of his planned social justice policies. He plans to overhaul Venezuela's governmental and political structure and to open up Venezuela's political environment to more independent and third parties, as he promised during his 1998 election campaign. In the process, Chávez also tried to deal a fatal blow to his opposing parties, Acción Democrática (Democratic Action) and COPEI.
On Dec. 15, 1999, weeks of heavy rains caused landslides across the state, claiming at least 30,000 lives. Critics claimed that Chavez had ignored emergency reports of flooding from civil defense groups because he was focused on the referendum and government reforms. The government denied these criticisms, and Chávez arrived in the affected areas to lead relief operations. That was followed by another landslide in 2000, but it was reduced to just three deaths. Re-elections
Elections for a new unicameral National Assembly took place on July 30, 2000, and in the same election, Chavez also supported fresh presidential elections. Chávez's coalition won two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly in one fell swoop, while Chávez received 60 percent of the vote in the presidential election. The international Carter Center, which monitored the election, concluded in their report that the National Assembly election was unconstitutional due to the lack of transparency, the partiality of the Electoral Commission, and the pressure exerted by the Chávez government, but their report did not change the results announced by the Electoral Commission. They did, however, consider the presidential re-election partly legitimate.
Later, on December 3, 2000, local elections and referendums were held. The referendum was to decide whether to agree to a bill proposed by Chavez to force all Venezuelan labor unions to hold state-supervised elections. The referendum was widely condemned by international trade union organizations, including the International Labor Organization, which criticized it as excessive government interference within the unions and threatened international sanctions against Venezuela.
After the May and July 2000 elections, Chavez introduced an 'authorization bill' which was passed by the National Assembly. This bill would authorize Chavez to govern Venezuela by decree for one year. In November 2001, a month before the expiration of the authorization bill, Chavez enacted 49 bills in one fell swoop. These bills included a hydrocarbon law and an agrarian law, while the Federation of Venezuelan Chambers of Commerce (Fedecámaras) and the Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV) vigorously opposed these new bills and prepared to hold a general industrial strike on December 10, 2001, in the hopes that the The president would reconsider the bills and hold a public debate on them. However, the strike action was ultimately unsuccessful in influencing Chavez's decisions or policies.
By the end of Chávez's third year in office, Chávez's main policies had succeeded in cracking down on Venezuela's landowners, and Chávez's reforms were also claimed to have improved social welfare, lowered the infant mortality rate, and had roughly structured a government-funded, free health care system, as well as a free education system - up to the point of reaching university education. By December 2001, with Chávez's policies of capital control, Venezuela's inflation had dropped from 40 percent to 12 percent, while economic development had stabilized at about 4 percent. Chávez's policies also reportedly increased elementary school enrollment by as much as one million students. In 2003 and 2004 Chavez undertook a series of social and economic programs to maintain popular support. In July 2003 he launched the Misión Robinson program, which aimed to provide free reading, writing, and arithmetic classes to the more than 1.5 million illiterate Venezuelan adults (prior to Chávez's 1999 administration). On October 12, 2003, Chávez launched the Misión Guaicaipuro, a program to protect the livelihoods, beliefs, lands, cultures, and other rights of indigenous communities in Venezuela. At the end of 2003, Chávez launched the Misión0 Sucre program, which aims to provide free higher education to 2 million Venezuelan adults who have not completed basic education. In November 2003, Chávez launched the Misión Ribas program, which aims to provide improved education and diplomas to five million Venezuelan high school dropouts. At a ceremony commemorating the first anniversary of the Robinson program, Chávez addressed 50,000 Venezuelans who had completed their literacy education, saying, "In one year, we have graduated 1,250,000 Venezuelans." In one year we have graduated 1,250,000 Venezuelans. Still, Chavez has suffered some minor setbacks, notably inflation, which soared to 31 percent in 2002 and remained at about 27 percent in 2002, making life more difficult for the poor.
On May 9, 2004, 126 Colombians were captured in an attack on a farm near Caracas, and Chavez immediately accused them of being foreign-backed paramilitaries intent on violently overthrowing his regime. These events have only served to intensify the rivalry between pro- and anti-Chávez camps in Venezuelan society. Chavez also claimed that there was a coup d'état against him in 2004, the authenticity of which remains undetermined to this day. In October 2005, 27 accused Colombians were found guilty, while the rest were released and deported.
In early and mid-2003, a referendum rights organization called Súmate began collecting the millions of signatures needed to launch a referendum to recall the president, and by August 2003 had collected about 3.2 million signatures, which the pro-Chávez-majority Electoral Council refused to accept because of a constitutional requirement that the president must be elected halfway through his term, or three years. However, the Electoral Council, which has a majority of pro-Chávez supporters, refused to accept the signatures because the constitution requires that a recall must be initiated after half of a president's term (i.e., three years), and the signatures were collected before Chávez had even completed his third year. Opposition and international news outlets reported that Chávez had begun punishing those who participated in the signatures, while Chávez advocates claimed that many laborers had been forced by their employers to provide signatures in the workplace. In November 2003, the opposition renewed the collection of signatures, gathering as many as 3.6 million signatures in just four days. That's when rumors alleged that Chavez had used deception to fool the collectors of signatures, and riots broke out across the country.
The terms of the constitution require that signatures from 20 percent of voters must be collected to launch a recall referendum. On top of that, the signers' national ID numbers were not kept secret. The opposition also accused the Chavez government of raising the bar for signatures by granting citizenship to illegal immigrants and refugees, boosting voter registration by 2 million in advance of the referendum and raising the bar by a whopping 20 percent for a recall referendum.
Numerous reports have also alleged that the Chavez government penalized those who publicly mailed in their signatures, with government agencies including state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela, the Caracas subway, and public **** hospitals controlled by Chavez advocates accused of arbitrarily firing signatories. Finally, after opposition leaders presented 2,436,830 valid signatures to the National Electoral Council, the Electoral Council announced on June 8, 2004, that a recall referendum would be held. Chavez and his political allies also began mobilizing voters to vote for the 'no' option.
The recall vote was held on Aug. 15, 2004, and resulted in 59 percent of votes cast for the "no" option. Observers from the European Union claimed that the Chavez government placed too many restrictions on them to observe the election [53]. The Carter Center's observations described the election as fair and open. Critics claimed that it was a false result and documented the exact opposite, and many questioned the authenticity of the government-owned voting machines. Opponents claimed it was a "massive fraud" and questioned the Carter Center's reasoning, though five polls conducted by the opposition also showed Chavez winning.
At the end of his victory in the recall vote, an energized Chavez declared that he would fight "imperialism" in addition to poverty. Despite Chávez's assurances that he would open a dialog with the opposition, Chávez's government soon began retaliating against Súmate's sponsors, accusing them of treason and collaboration with foreign powers, and accusing them of receiving funds from the U.S. State Department through the National Endowment for Democracy. As a result of the referendum victory, Chávez's primary goals-fundamental social and economic reforms and redistribution of wealth-were dramatically accelerated. Once again, Chavez has placed the development and practice of the 'Bolivarian Mission' at the forefront of his political agenda. The surge in global oil prices allowed Chavez to earn billions in additional foreign currency reserves, and the economy grew at a remarkable rate, reaching a two-digit figure in 2004 and maintaining a 9.3 percent growth rate in 2005.
Many of the new policies were introduced after 2004. In March 2005, the Chávez government enacted a series of media-control bills that ruled it illegal for the media to defame and slander public ****icials; defamation of character against Chávez and other officials could incur a prison sentence of up to 40 months. When Chavez was asked if he would actually detain media figures for 40 months for defamation, Chavez commented, "I don't care what they [the private media] call me. ...... As Don Quixote said, 'If there are dogs barking, it's because people are working.'" Chávez has also used the enactment of more new bills to expand land redistribution and social welfare programs, including the Mission Vuelta al Campo (Return to the Countryside Program) and the Mission Barrio Adentro (National Health Program), both of which were launched in June 2005 and are based on the construction, support, and renovation of the second (integration of diagnostic centers) and the third (integration of hospitals). Diagnostic Centers) and third place (hospitals) of the public **** health care system, as well as the Mission Miranda, which constructed a national militia system. During the same period, Venezuelan doctors went on strike to protest the new policy of eliminating the institutions in which they had worked and replacing them with Cuban doctors.
Chavez began to focus on Venezuela's foreign relations in 2004 and 2005, through new bilateral and multilateral agreements that included humanitarian support and construction programs. Chavez's efforts have been met with various degrees of success, with leaders of many other countries, securing the friendships of Nestor Kirchner of Argentina, Hu Jintao of China, Fidel Castro of Cuba and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. On March 4, 2005, Chavez declared that the U.S.-backed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) was 'dead'. Chávez claimed that neoliberal development structures could not be applied to Latin American countries, and that therefore a negative, anti-capitalist structure would increase trade and diplomatic relations between Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil. Chavez has also claimed that he wants to create a military cooperation structure similar to Nato, but left-wing and Latin American.
In 2004 and 2005, Chavez also tried to get the Venezuelan military to reduce its ties to the United States in terms of weapons sources and military. Venezuela under Chavez gradually switched to buying arms from different weapons-producing countries, such as Brazil, Russia, China and Spain. These arms purchases caused friction between Venezuela and the United States, and Chavez ended military cooperation between the two countries outright. He also demanded that active U.S. military personnel leave Venezuela. In addition to this, in 2005 Chavez announced the creation of a large "reserve military force" under the Miranda Program, consisting of 1.5 million Venezuelan citizens in militias - as a means of fending off foreign intervention and invasion. In October 2005, Chávez expelled a Christian missionary organization called the New Tribes Mission, accusing them of being "imperialist infiltrators" and harboring CIA agents. During the same period, he granted inalienable titles to 6,800 square kilometers of land inhabited by indigenous Amazonian peoples, making it impossible to buy or sell these lands under Western forms of ownership. With these changes, Chávez is demonstrating that his revolution is also a revolution in defense of indigenous rights.
During this period, Chávez focused more on non-mainstream models of economic development and international trade, with many programs ambitiously taking the form of international agreements with hemisphere-wide scope. On Aug. 20, 2005, for example, Chavez gave a speech at the graduation ceremony for medical school exchange students sent by Cuba, saying he would establish medical schools similar to those in Cuba that would provide free medical training - at a cost of $20 billion to $30 billion - to train more than 100,000 physicians, who would travel to impoverished Southern Hemisphere countries with promises to provide medical care. These doctors would travel to poor southern hemisphere countries on a promise to provide medical care. He claimed that the program would continue for another 10 years and that the new schools would include more than 30,000 new locations to provide free medical education to poor students from Latin American and Caribbean countries.
Chavez has also used the vast opportunities of the international arena to contrast the results of his program with those of neoliberal globalization, most notably at the 2005 U.N. World Summit, where he blamed neoliberal approaches such as the liberalization of capital flows, the elimination of barriers to trade, and privatization for the poverty of developing countries. Chávez also warned of a looming world energy crisis, especially the depletion of hydrocarbons (based on Hubbert's theory of the apex), asserting that "we are facing an unprecedented energy crisis ...... oil is already starting to run out". Meanwhile, in reference to the failure of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) at the Summit of the Americas in Argentina on November 7, 2005, Chávez declared that "the biggest loser today is George Walker Bush," and Chávez has seized the opportunity to publicize his creation of an off-the-wall model of trade known as the Alternativa Bolivariana para América (ALBA), or the Alternative Bolivariana para América (ALBA). Alternativa Bolivariana para América), which unfolded on December 14, 2004 with the cooperation of Venezuela and Cuba. On January 10, 2007, Chávez was sworn in as president of the new Venezuelan government and gave a speech. His new cabinet invited David Velázquez and Joseph Ramón Rivero from the ****anistas to go to the affairs of the 'Ministry of Participation and Social Development of the Popular Regime' and the Ministry of Labor, respectively, and Chávez told his new Minister of Labor that he was a Trotskyist.
On Jan. 26, 2007, Iranian President Ahmadinejad visited Venezuela to discuss reducing crude oil production to address the glut of crude on the market. The two men said they would spend billions of dollars to help free some countries from U.S. control, and the two governments signed 11 agreements to cooperate in areas such as tourism, education and minerals.
Chavez also said in a televised speech on March 25, 2007, that he would implement "collective ownership," nationalizing large farms and redistributing unused land to the poor.
Chavez said at an April 30 rally to celebrate May 1, International Labor Day, that the Venezuelan government had decided to raise the minimum wage to $286, a 20 percent increase over the two-year inflation index. People working in the public **** sector also enjoy a $209 "food basket" subsidy, making it the highest minimum wage in Latin America. on May 1, 2007, Venezuela paid off its $3 billion debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank ahead of schedule, and Chávez announced that Venezuela was withdrawing from the IMF and the World Bank, and demanded that they return the original debt. World Bank and demanded that they return the membership dues originally paid by Venezuela. Chavez said on May 14 that 18 offshore oil drilling platforms managed by multinational companies would be nationalized.
A May 21, 2007, document from the Venezuelan Congressional Finance Committee showed that the Ministry of Culture would allocate $1.78 million to Glover for the film's scripting and location shooting. Chavez had accused Hollywood of denigrating South Americans in its movies when he visited the studios in 2006. On May 28, Chavez ordered the closure of the more than five-decade-old Venezuelan (RCTV) television station in favor of small community alternative media, replacing RCTV with a new public broadcasting channel, which drew criticism and attention both inside and outside of Venezuela. On the same day, Venezuela's Minister of Information and Communications, William Lara, held a press conference in the capital, Caracas, announcing that he had filed a lawsuit against the U.S. network CNN for juxtaposing Venezuelan President Chávez with al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden on screen. In addition to targeting the U.S. network, the Venezuelan government has filed charges against the country's Universal Television for inciting the assassination of Chavez.
In a speech to local university students in the capital city of Caracas on May 24, Chavez said the entrance examination system for higher education is outdated, arguing that it has led to the loss of access to higher education for some of the young students, and canceled the system of entrance exams for higher education, as well as the system of exams for the period in which the students will be studying at higher education institutions.
On June 1, 2007, Venezuela and Vietnam signed nine legal documents of energy, scientific and technological and political nature to strengthen friendly and cooperative relations between the two countries. Chavez and Nong Duc Manh signed a joint statement to show the views of both sides on different international and regional issues of *** with interest, as well as on the latest developments in bilateral relations. He announced that Vietnam will join Russia, Belarus and China in the development of the second block of Huning in Venezuela's Orinoco oil belt, and that Vietnam will export oil with great potential, especially offshore. In a June 6 speech, Chávez praised his friend Vladimir Putin for his "resolute fight against U.S. imperialism," thanked Putin for helping him secure power during the 2002 coup, and announced that he was preparing to visit his "strategic ally" Russia, where he might propose cooperation that would be extremely favorable to Russian oil companies. He announced that he was preparing to visit Russia, a "strategic ally," where he might propose cooperation that would be extremely favorable to Russian oil companies, as well as increased purchases of Russian weapons. He then revealed a completely unknown inside story, thanking Putin for his active help during the 2002 coup d'état in Venezuela, when the opposition had forced Chávez to lose control of the country for several days, but he did not release details of Putin's help in stabilizing the regime.On June 12, Chávez traveled to Cuba, where he met with Cuban leader Fidel Castro for six hours to discuss issues such as the development of the two countries*** and the development of their relationship. issues such as the ****same development of the two countries. In addition, on June 9, local time, Chavez gave an exclusive interview to the U.S. media, revealing some of the inner workings of his and Castro's many previous talks and declaring that Cuba is more democratic than the United States. During the interview, he emphasized that Venezuela is carrying out its own socialist construction and has not copied the Cuban model. He also pointed out that the U.S. is planning an invasion of Venezuela and Cuba all the time.
On June 12, 2007, Chavez called on the nation to move those unused refrigerators to the central plaza and give their extra trucks and pots to the poor. He pledged $250,000 and urged the Venezuelan people to follow his example.On June 19, while attending a groundbreaking ceremony for a thermoelectric power plant in the state of Zulia, Chavez announced that the government would build more than 200 "socialist factories" as part of the National Bolivarian Revolutionary Development Plan (PNDB). "Chávez also said that the remainder of the plants would be built with the help of the National Bolivarian Revolution's Development Plan. Chávez also said that "socialist factories" would be established in strategic sectors such as food, construction, clothing, chemicals, automobile parts and computers during the remainder of the year. These enterprises will "strengthen our independence and sovereignty and will prioritize the satisfaction of the basic needs of all people."
On June 24, 2007, Chavez issued a new call to arms. He claimed that the government in Washington was waging unconventional warfare against Venezuela, using psychological and economic warfare as weapons in an attempt to destabilize his government, and called on the Venezuelan army to think about and be ready to fight a war of resistance every day. On the same day, Chávez announced that he would give the army a 30 percent pay increase in a push to professionalize the military, which would benefit first the frontline combat troops. On June 21, he also confirmed a plan to buy a fleet of submarines a new arms purchase from Russia to protect the country's 500,000 square kilometers of Caribbean territory.On June 29, Chávez made a three-day official visit to Russia. While attending the opening of the Latin American Cultural Center at the Foreign Literature Library building in Moscow on June 28, he called on participants to study "the works of Marx and Lenin, which predicted the inevitable demise of capitalism, and to defeat U.S. imperialism." In his speech, Chavez pointed out that the US plan to deploy a missile defense system in Europe is clearly aimed at Russia and said that US President George W. Bush's attempts to deprive the free Iranian nation of its right to peaceful nuclear energy are even more intolerable.