Caracasket

Or

Victim Hugo

Or

No Oil for Joe!

(Props to interested observer Shawn)
In a nod to the Monroe Doctrine, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has died of cancer or its complications at the age of 58. The fiery populist blamed capitalism for destroying life on Mars as part of his Latin American socialist revolution. After leading a failed coup as an army paratroop commander in 1992 he was jailed, and after he was pardoned in 1994, his countrymen decided to reward his creative approach to patriotism by electing him president in 1998. Through strong-arm tactics he held power for the next 14 years, winning 2 more elections as fairly run as your typical Internet vote with opponents and opposing viewpoints being suppressed or disappeared, and surviving a coup attempt in 2002. Chavez built a broad power base among the nation’s poor by using his nation’s oil revenues to launch social programs, including subsidized stores, public housing and free health and education programs. While doling out fish, he neglected to provide poles, and the country’s economy stagnated while the homicide rate skyrocketed. He proclaimed himself a successor of the revolutionary Simon Bolivar, whose sword he would wield at public events before launching into performances of folk songs and tributes to Mao Zedong and Friedrich Nietzsche. He made friends among the world’s rogue states in 2006 when he called President George W. Bush the devil and claimed the podium still reeked of sulfur after Bush's address at the United Nations. His efforts to support the underprivileged, including a low-income oil program for the suffering indigents of Massachusetts, won him praise among rogue Americans like Sean Penn, who said that “America had lost a friend it didn’t know it had.”