Body of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez lies in state

Fellow Latin American leaders paid their respects to Hugo Chavez
The body of the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, is lying in state at the military academy in Caracas.

His family and close advisers, as well as the presidents of Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay, paid their respects next to his open casket on Wednesday.

Mr Chavez died aged 58 after suffering from cancer for nearly two years.

Hundreds of thousands of people earlier took to the streets of the capital to pay tribute as a hearse carrying his coffin took hours to reach the academy.

The state funeral for Mr Chavez is due to take place on Friday.

Political vacuum
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At the scene

Irene Caselli
BBC News, Caracas
Hugo Chavez’s body is lying in state at the Fuerte Tiuna Military Academy in Caracas, where Mr Chavez studied as a young cadet.

The casket, covered in a Venezuelan flag, was placed in a hall dedicated to the Liberators of South America.

Thousands of people lined up quietly to say one last goodbye to Mr Chavez, among them government officials and Latin American leaders such as Bolivian President Evo Morales and Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

The casket was taken by hearse through the streets of Caracas from the military hospital where Mr Chavez died on Tuesday. The televised procession took over seven hours, and thousands of people accompanied Mr Chavez’s family and government officials for kilometres.

Upon reaching the military academy, a mass was held with the participation of Mr Chavez’s mother and daughters, who were received with a long applause.

Supporters of the late Venezuelan leader gathered in Caracas on Wednesday to catch a glimpse of his coffin as it was driven 5 miles (8km) through the streets from the military hospital where he died on Tuesday to the military academy, where he will lie in state.

Mourners, many wearing red T-shirts and carrying pictures of Mr Chavez, threw flowers at the coffin, which was draped in a Venezuelan flag.

The BBC’s Will Grant says there was a palpable sense of grief among the Chavez supporters, many of whom were visibly moved at losing the man who they thank for changing their lives.

“After Jesus Christ, there’s Hugo Chavez,” Maria Alexandra, a 46-year-old mother of six, told the AFP news agency. “Before him, the government didn’t take care about us. Now children have everything.”

The coffin was greeted with sustained applause as it arrived at the military academy.

Mr Chavez’s family and the Latin American leaders later attended Mass at the academy’s chapel, where he will lie in state in an open casket.

Afterwards, his mother and children gathered around the coffin to pay their respects. Then, military commanders and members of his cabinet took their turns to file past before the chapel was opened to the public.

Our correspondent says the death of a leader, around whom an entire political movement has been built, has created a potential vacuum at the heart of his revolution.

According to the constitution, there must be a presidential election within 30 days and the government has said it intends to stick to that timetable.

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Vice-President Nicolas Maduro, whom Mr Chavez named as his preferred successor in December, is widely predicted to win the upcoming poll as the candidate of the governing United Socialist Party (PSUV).

Mr Maduro is expected to face the opposition leader, Henrique Capriles, who stood for the presidency in October but was beaten by Mr Chavez. The opposition has yet to confirm Mr Capriles as its official candidate.

But for now, the election is the last thing on the minds of the Chavez supporters, who are simply trying to come to terms with their loss and are calling for him to be interred inside the National Pantheon alongside Venezuela’s liberator, Simon Bolivar, our correspondent adds.

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Timeline: Hugo Chavez

1954: Born 28 July in Sabaneta, Barinas state, the son of schoolteachers
1975: Graduates from Venezuelan Academy of Military Sciences
1992: Leads doomed attempt to overthrow government of President Carlos Andres Perez, jailed for two years
1994: Relaunches his party as the Movement of the Fifth Republic
1999: Takes office after winning 1998 election
2002: Abortive coup. Returns to power after two days
2011: Reveals he is being treated for cancer
2012 (October): Re-elected for another six-year term
2012 (December): Has fourth cancer operation in Cuba
2013 (February): Returns to Venezuela to continue treatment
2013 (March): Death is announced by Venezuelan government
Obituary: Hugo Chavez
Economic muddle of Chavez legacy
Global perceptions of Hugo Chavez
Appeals for peace
Announcing the death of Mr Chavez in a televised address on Tuesday, Mr Maduro promised to maintain his Chavez’s “revolutionary, anti-imperialist and socialist legacy” and called on the nation to close ranks.

“In the immense pain of this historic tragedy that has affected our fatherland, we call on all the compatriots to be vigilant for peace, love, respect and tranquillity,” he said. “We ask our people to channel this pain into peace.”

The appeal was echoed by Mr Capriles, who told Venezuelans: “This is not the moment to highlight what separates us. This is not the hour for differences; it is the hour for union, it is the hour for peace.”

The exact nature of Mr Chavez’s cancer was never officially disclosed, leading to continuing speculation about his health, and he had not been seen in public for several months.

Last May, the former army paratrooper said he had recovered from an unspecified cancer, after undergoing surgery and chemotherapy in Cuba in 2011 and a further operation in February 2012.

However, in December Mr Chavez announced he needed further cancer surgery in Cuba and his inauguration had to be delayed the next month because he was too unwell. He returned to Venezuela in February, but was confined to the military hospital.

Shortly before the president passed away, Mr Maduro claimed that his cancer had been induced by foul play by Venezuela’s enemies.

Two American diplomats were subsequently expelled after being accused of spying. The US government promptly rejected the allegation as “absurd”.

Those strongly behind the “End is Near school of thought” can have a new reason to support their stance.

The video above shows a female preacher talking about the word of God, looking nude, with a greater percentage of her breasts out for the viewers to see.

We gathered that men are flocking to her church as a result of this.

The Good, Racist People
By TA-NEHISI COATES
Published: March 6, 2013 1 Comment

Last month the actor Forest Whitaker was stopped in a Manhattan delicatessen by an employee. Whitaker is one of the pre-eminent actors of his generation, with a diverse and celebrated catalog ranging from “The Great Debaters” to “The Crying Game” to “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.” By now it is likely that he has adjusted to random strangers who can’t get his turn as Idi Amin out of their heads. But the man who approached the Oscar winner at the deli last month was in no mood for autographs. The employee stopped Whitaker, accused him of shoplifting and then promptly frisked him. The act of self-deputization was futile. Whitaker had stolen nothing. On the contrary, he’d been robbed.
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Liz Lynch

The deli where Whitaker was harassed happens to be in my neighborhood. Columbia University is up the street. Broadway, the main drag, is dotted with nice restaurants and classy bars that cater to beautiful people. I like my neighborhood. And I’ve patronized the deli with some regularity, often several times in a single day. I’ve sent my son in my stead. My wife would often trade small talk with whoever was working checkout. Last year when my beautiful niece visited, she loved the deli so much that I felt myself a sideshow. But it’s understandable. It’s a good deli.

Since the Whitaker affair, I’ve read and listened to interviews with the owner of the establishment. He is apologetic to a fault and is sincerely mortified. He says that it was a “sincere mistake” made by a “decent man” who was “just doing his job.” I believe him. And yet for weeks now I have walked up Broadway, glancing through its windows with a mood somewhere between Marvin Gaye’s “Distant Lover” and Al Green’s “For the Good Times.”

In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist. In 1957, neighbors in Levittown, Pa., uniting under the flag of segregation, wrote: “As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens, we feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community.”

A half-century later little had changed. The comedian Michael Richards (Kramer on “Seinfeld”) once yelled at a black heckler from the stage: “He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger!” Confronted about this, Richards apologized and then said, “I’m not a racist,” and called the claim “insane.”

The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker’s assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years.

But much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner. The promise of America is that those who play by the rules, who observe the norms of the “middle class,” will be treated as such. But this injunction is only half-enforced when it comes to black people, in large part because we were never meant to be part of the American story. Forest Whitaker fits that bill, and he was addressed as such.

I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.

The other day I walked past this particular deli. I believe its owners to be good people. I felt ashamed at withholding business for something far beyond the merchant’s reach. I mentioned this to my wife. My wife is not like me. When she was 6, a little white boy called her cousin a nigger, and it has been war ever since. “What if they did that to your son?” she asked.

And right then I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I could take.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic, is a guest columnist. Nicholas D. Kristof is on book leave.

A 42-year-old father, Mr. Edet Etok-Akpan, is currently being quizzed at the headquarters of the Cross River State Police Command in Calabar for torturing his six-year-old daughter, Edidiong, as a result of a church prophetess’ pronouncement that the girl was a witch.

Edidiong was beaten by her father and locked up in a room with her hands, mouth and face bound for four days before she was rescued by neighbours.

It was learnt that Etok-Akpan started beating her on February 19 after an unidentified prophetess in their church told him that Edidiong was the witch responsible for the stagnancy in his life.

Narrating her ordeal to PUNCH Metro on Monday, Edidiong said after the beatings which lasted for some days, her father on February 21 tied her hands with a cord and bound her mouth with a piece of cloth.

She said, “He locked me in the inner room of our house and he never gave me food and never allowed me to go to school.”

The girl, who said she is in basic three at Femos Nursery and Primary School located at 24 Etyin Abasi Street, said she was becoming weak after days without food or water.

Luck, however, came her way on February 23, when another child, who lives with her parents in the same 42 Atakpa Street, came to their veranda to look for broom and discovered her.

Giving details of how she was rescued, a lawyer with the Basic Rights Counsel, Mr. James Ibor, said, “The girl went to Edidiong’s veranda to look for a broom and heard the sound of the girl like that of someone battling with her last breath.

“She looked through the louvers of the window and saw Edidiong bound on the floor and raised the alarm. Her parents and other neighbours rushed to the place and saw Edidiong bound inside her apartment.”

Ibor said one of the neighbours called him and he in turn informed the police.

He said, “When the policemen and I got there, we saw a crowd gathered outside. We were able to rescue the child by breaking the door.

“The girl was very weak because she had been without food for days and so we had to give her water first, then after about ten minutes we gave her milk before solid food an hour later.”

Ibor said the culprit and his wife had locked up the girl in the inner room of their two-room apartment and went to church, adding that the girl was presently living with her grandmother in another part of the town.

The state Police Public Relations Officer, Mr. John Umoh, said Etok-Akpan, who is from Akwa Ibom State, had been arrested and would soon appear in court to answer charges of felony.

He said, “To tie a small girl’s hand and mouth and lock her in a room for some days without food is a grievous offence, he shall soon appear in court.”

Umoh, a Deputy Superintendent of Police, warned parents to always treat their children with care, adding criminalities are increasing daily because parents had abandoned their responsibilities to their wards.

He also said the police would visit the church where the father got the prophecy.
Punch