Supporters starts emotional farewell to Huge chavez
Caracas: The coffin of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez was taken to a military academy where he will lie in state for three days, as throngs of weeping supporters swarmed Caracas streets to bid farewell.
Ther coffin was then ushered inside, with his grieving mother Elena covering her face with a white handkerchief, alongside Chavez’s three daughters and somber-faced son, Huguito. Chavez’s death after a near two-year struggle with cancer was a blow to his supporters and to the alliance of left-wing Latin American powers, and plunged his resource-rich country into uncertainty as an election is organized.
Under Chavez, Venezuela’s oil wealth has underwritten the Castro brothers’ communist rule in Cuba and he repeatedly courted confrontation with Washington by cosying up to anti-Western governments in Russia, Syria and Iran.
His body, surrounded by soldiers en route to the military academy where the paratrooper found his political calling as a young man, will lie in state until an official ceremony with foreign dignitaries on Thursday.
People watched from their apartment windows while others climbed fences to get a better view of the hearse. Many held or wore iconic images of Chavez. “We will carry him in our hearts forever. We’re going forward until death with him,” said Jose Viloria, 64, an agricultural trader, as the president’s coffin made its way along a packed avenue under a hillside slum that was a bastion of support.
(Agencies)
