Hugo Chavez: Global reactions to the Venezuelan leader's death

While he was alive, Hugo Chávez – the longest ruling democratically elected leader in Latin America – inspired people who loved him as often as he inflamed those who didn’t. That polarization seemed to follow him in death.

Asia and Africa

Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters
A supporter of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez reacts to the announcement of his death in Caracas, March 5.

In Johannesburg, President Jacob Zuma extended his condolences, while the African National Congress released a statement calling Chávez "one of South America's political giants."  

To the people of Venezuela we say their mourning is the mourning of all countries that are fighting to reclaim their place in the world economy. 

China's Xinhua newswire said leaders Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping shared their condolences, while the foreign minister highlighted the friendship between the two countries.

"President Chávez was an outstanding leader of Venezuela and a good friend of the Chinese people," China Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said, adding that Chávez made significant contributions to advancing the friendly and cooperative relations between China and Venezuela.

According to Bloomberg, Venezuela sells China nearly 19 percent of its oil output. (about 518,000 barrels a day in 2013).

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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