Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves is proposing that a facility in St. Vincent and the Grenadines be named in honor of former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who died of cancer recently.
“I believe it would be fitting for us, at some time, to have a facility, whether it be a school or some other public building or facility, named after President Chavez,” Gonsalves told Parliament.
He described the late Venezuelan leader as a “giant of a political figure, a splendid human being” and an “integrationist for the region, one who possessed a profound dislike of injustice, a man for the poor and the working people and our Latin America and the Caribbean.”
Gonsalves said St. Vincent and the Grenadines had benefited immensely from the leadership of Chavez and that he is quite sure that excellent relations will continue under the new government in Caracas.
He told legislators that it pains him to say that some people here, across the Caribbean, as well as in Venezuela and other parts of the world rejoiced at Chavez’s death.
“The glee with which some people greeted the death of Chavez. It is just terrible,” he said, adding it was “the same kind of a glee” that some people here “have for the Buccament Bay Resort to fail or for the Argyle International Airport not to succeed and want to see Building & Loan collapse.”
“It is a kind of perversity, which … I am not able to fathom the reasoning. We really have to get past these things,” Gonsalves said.
Gonsalves detailed the assistance that St. Vincent and the Grenadines has received from Venezuela in the areas of healthcare, education, economic development, and infrastructural development.
“How could anybody be happy to see a man like that die? What has happened to some of us in this country and this world?” he said.
“Hugo Chavez was in quest of the uplifting of human beings to a much higher level,” he told Parliament.
