Barack Obama

A biography of Barack Obama - Documentary

Hugo Chávez

Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías

• Chávez was the president of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013.
• Born into a working-class family in Sabaneta, Barinas 
• He became a military officer.
• he founded the secretive Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200 (MBR-200) in the early 1980s and worked to overthrowingthe Venezuelan political system
• He was imprisoned and released from prison after two years, he founded a social democratic political party, the Fifth Republic Movement, and was elected president of Venezuela in 1998.
• Allying himself strongly with the communist governments like:
  1. governments of Fidel and then Raúl Castro in Cuba.
  2. the socialist governments of Evo Morales in Bolivia.
  3. Rafael Correa in Ecuador.
  4. Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.
• He supported Latin American and Caribbean cooperation and was instrumental in setting up the pan-regional Union of South American Nations, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, the Bank of the South, and the regional television network TeleSur.
• However, Chavez had extensive disputes with Colombia, and supported rebels in Colombia and Ecuador. 
• Chávez was a highly controversial and divisive figure both at home and abroad, having insulted other world leaders and compared U.S. president George W. Bush to a donkey, and called him the devil
• His presidency was seen as a part of the socialist "pink tide" sweeping Latin America. 
• Chávez described his policies as anti-imperialist, being a prominent adversary of the United States' foreign policy as well as a vocal critic of U.S.-supported neoliberalism and laissez-faire capitalism 
• He was the leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.
• Through his socialist reforms in the country which were based on the Bolivarian Revolution, He managed to achieve many objectives:
  1. He implemented a new constitution.
  2. He also started a participatory democratic councils.
  3. He nationalized several key industries.
  4. Hugo Chávez also increased government funding of health care and education,
  5. According  to government figures, Chávez managed to reduce poverty.
• Chávez  died in Caracas on 5 March 2013 at the age of 58 due to a cancer he had suffered from.

Barack Hussein Obama

Early life

• Barack Obama was born to a white American mother, Ann Dunham, and a black Kenyan father, Barack Obama Sr.
• They were both young college students at the University of Hawaii. 
• When his father left for Harvard, Barack Obama and his mother stayed behind
• His father ultimately returned alone to Kenya, where he worked as a government economist. 
• Barack's mother remarried an Indonesian oil manager and moved to Jakarta when Barack was six. 
• He later recounted Indonesia as simultaneously lush and poor.
• He returned to Hawaii, where he was brought up largely by his grandparents. 
• The family lived in a small apartment - his grandfather was a furniture salesman and an unsuccessful insurance agent and his grandmother worked in a bank.
• Barack managed to get into Punahou School, Hawaii's top prep academy. 
• His father wrote to him regularly but, though he traveled around the world on official business for Kenya, he visited only once, when Barack was ten.

University and Politics

• Obama attended Columbia University, where he majored in political science with a specialty in international relations and graduated with a B.A. in 1983.
• After four years in New York City, Obama was hired in Chicago as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland  on Chicago's far South Side. He worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988
• He spent these three years helping poor South Side residents cope with a wave of plant closings.
• He then attended Harvard Law School, and in 1990 became the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. 
• He also began teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, and married Michelle Robinson, a fellow attorney. 
• Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, succeeding State Senator Alice Palmer as Senator from Illinois's 13th District, which at that time spanned Chicago South Side neighborhoods from Hyde Park – Kenwood south to South Shore and west to Chicago Lawn

President

• In 2004 Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat, representing Illinois, and he gained national attention by giving a rousing and well-received keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. 
• On February 10, 2007, Obama announced his candidacy for president of the United States in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois The choice of the announcement site was viewed as symbolic because it was also where Abraham Lincoln delivered his historic "House Divided" speech in 1858. Throughout the campaign, Obama emphasized the issues of rapidly ending the Iraq War, increasing energy independence and providing universal health care.
• A large number of candidates entered the Democratic Party presidential primaries. The field narrowed to a duel between Obama and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
• On June 3, with all states counted, Obama was named the presumptive nominee and delivered a victory speech in St. Paul, Minnesota. Clinton ended her campaign and endorsed him on June 7, 2008.
• Obama proceeded to focus on the general election campaign against Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee.
• Barack Obama won the race for presidency. In January 2009, he was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, and the first African-American ever elected to that position.