Reuters/Caracas

 

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has died after a two-year  battle with cancer, ending the socialist leader’s 14-year rule of the South American country, Vice President Nicolas Maduro announced late yesterday.

The flamboyant 58-year-old leader had undergone four operations in Cuba for a cancer that was first detected in his pelvic region in mid-2011. His last surgery was on December 11 and he had not been seen in public since.

“It’s a moment of deep pain,” Maduro, accompanied by senior ministers, said, his voice choking.

Chavez easily won a new six-year term at an election in October and his death will devastate millions of supporters who adored his charismatic style, anti-US rhetoric and oil-financed policies that brought subsidised food and free health clinics to long-neglected slums.

Meanwhile, the United States has rejected Venezuela’s allegations of a conspiracy, saying it was “absurd” to assert Washington was somehow behind Chavez’s cancer.

The Pentagon confirmed the expulsion of two military officers from the US embassy in Caracas and the State Department spokesman said: “An assertion that the United States was somehow involved in causing President Chavez’s illness is absurd, and we definitively reject it.”

The comments came shortly before Chavez’s death was announced in Caracas.