CARACAS – Countless Venezuelans filed past the remains of President Hugo Chavez on Thursday, crying, making the sign of the cross and giving military salutes as an era ended and elections loomed in the oil-rich nation.

Chavez.

Chavez lay in state in a half-open casket in the Caracas military academy, with eyes closed behind a glass, wearing olive green military fatigues, a black tie and the iconic red beret that became a symbol of his 14-year socialist rule.

Thousands of people stood in line for hours through the night to get a glimpse of the former paratrooper whose oil-funded socialism earned him friends and foes at home and abroad.

The country gave Chavez a rousing send-off through the streets of Caracas on Wednesday, one day after he lost his battle with cancer at the age of 58, with a sea of people in red shirts throwing flowers on his coffin.

At the front of the procession was his hand-picked successor, Vice President Nicolas Maduro. 

His mentor now lies in state in the hall of the academy where he found his political calling, inspiring the former colonel to lead a failed coup in 1992 before being elected in 1998.

The crowd applauded and then chanted “Chavez lives, the struggle goes on!”

The coffin of Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chavez is driven through the streets of Caracas after leaving the military hospital where he died of cancer, in Caracas, March 6, 2013. Authorities have not yet said where Chavez will be buried

Chavez’s death on Tuesday was a blow to his supporters and to the alliance of left-wing Latin American powers he led, and it has plunged his OPEC member nation into uncertainty.

Maduro, 50, has now taken the mantle of Chavismo, an ideology that poured the nation’s oil riches into social programs, and will likely face off in elections against opposition leader Henrique Capriles, who lost to Chavez in the October presidential election.

Under Chavez, Venezuela’s oil wealth has underwritten the Castro brothers’ communist rule in Cuba, and he repeatedly courted confrontation with Washington by cozying up to anti-Western governments in Russia, Syria and Iran.

Chavez’s revolution delighted the poor and infuriated the wealthy. But in a country divided by Chavez’s populist style, not everyone agreed on his legacy, with opposition supporters in better-off neighborhoods still angry.

A supporter of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez has his name written on her face while standing on a square in San Salvador March 5, 2013. Chavez died on Tuesday after a two-year battle with cancer, ending 14 years of tumultuous rule that made the socialist leader a hero for the poor but a hate figure to his opponents. REUTERS/Ulises Rodriguez

“Hate and division was the only thing that he spread,” 28-year-old computer programmer Jose Mendoza said in an eastern Caracas opposition bastion. 

Russia, China and Iran hailed Chavez as a great leader.

A senior U.S. official said the United States — denounced by Chavez as “the empire” — hopes to forge a “positive relationship” with Venezuela once the upheaval of Chavez’s death is over.

Maduro has picked up on Chavez’s anti-U.S. rhetoric, expelling two U.S. military attaches after earlier accusing Venezuela’s enemies of somehow causing the president’s cancer.

Chavez had won passionate support from Latin America to the Middle East. He visited Saudi Arabia three times, and toured Baghdad in 2000 in a car driven by Saddam Hussein. He visited the late Iraqi president again in 2002, and was the only Latin American leader to condemn the U.S. occupation.

Also in 2002, Chavez visited Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Libya and Algeria as part of a tour of member states of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. He invited these countries’ leaders to attend the OPEC summit in Caracas at the end of that year.

His circumstances did not allow him to visit Palestine, but President Mahmoud Abbas visited him in 2009. Chavez honored him with the Venezuelan medal of freedom, and a replica of the sword of Simon Bolivar, who liberated Latin American countries from Spanish colonial rule at the start of the 19th century.

Chavez opened a Venezuelan embassy in Palestine, and requested that his education minister distribute maps of the occupied Palestinian territories so students could see how small they are, and how Gaza alone is populated by 1.5 million people.

He visited Syria in 2006 and 2009, and was warmly received. To much applause, he praised Sultan Pasha Al-Atrash, leader of the Syrian revolution against the French mandate at the beginning of the last century. Bashar Al-Assad repaid the visit in 2010, the first Syrian president to travel to Venezuela, where there are reportedly more than 70,000 people of Syrian origin. Since then, Chavez frequently reiterated his support for Assad.

The Venezuelan leader visited Algeria four times, strengthening ties with it. He named a square in Caracas after national hero Abdelqader al-Jazairi, who led the struggle against France’s colonial invasion in the mid-19th century. A statue of Jazairi was placed in the square after Algeria erected in its capital a memorial statue of Bolivar in 2009.

Chavez also strengthened relations with Libya, which he visited three times. A playground in Libya’s second city Benghazi was named after him in 2009, but it was renamed after the revolution that toppled Muammar Gaddafi, which Chavez opposed. Following the killing of Gaddafi, the Venezuelan leader described him as a “martyr.”

Chavez’s expulsion of the Israeli ambassador and his severing of relations with Israel due to the war against Gaza in 2009 warmly stirred Arab emotions. Subsequently, a street in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr Al-Bared was named after him, as was a street in the Lebanese town of Al-Bireh. He never visited the country, although there are more than 100,000 people of Lebanese origin living in Venezuela.

Chavez established special relations with Iran, which he visited 13 times. His Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmedinejad visited Venezuela six times and was scheduled to attend his funeral on Friday. 

-MEO, TAAN