Hugo Chavez College Program Launched by Nicaragua's Sandinistas

Nicaragua’s ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front, FSLN, is launching a new program at the country’s National Autonomous University dedicated to former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.

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The program, named after the founder of the Bolivarian Revolution, will begin Friday, two days before the fourth anniversary of his death.

“Students will study different aspects of the thought, legacy, practice and above all that path that illuminated the great Commander Hugo Chavez,” Nicaraguan Vice President and FSLN leader Rosario Murillo said, Prensa Latina reports.

Socialism, Bolivarianism, liberation theology, Afro-Indigenous history, and anti-colonial history are among the many topics students of the Chavez program will undertake. They will also collaborate with scholars from the Bolivarian and Central universities of Venezuela on projects related to Latin American integration.

Nicaragua isn’t the only Central American country that’s honoring Chavez’s legacy through education.

On Wednesday, El Salvador’s ruling Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, FMLN, party announced the creation of a new college program honoring Chavez and Palestinian-Salvadoran revolutionary Schafik Handal.

The program, which begins exactly on the fourth anniversary of Chavez’s death, will be hosted at the Institute Association of Schafik Handal at the Central American University Jose Simeon Cañas in San Salvador.

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The FMLN launched the Institute last January on the 11th anniversary of his death. It will now collaborate with the Venezuelan Embassy in San Salvador to host joint Chavez-Handal research initiatives and symposiums.

Handal, a close friend of Chavez, co-founded the FMLN in 1980 and liberated several departments during El Salvador’s civil war in a nationwide guerrilla warfare campaign. A lifelong Marxist-Leninist, Handal helped to establish the FMLN as a legal socialist political party in the country.

“Our purpose is to transform the country not just by studying Chavez and Schafik, but also to empower the positive feelings and the reflections that Salvadorans have about the legacy of these two historical politicians,” Venezuelan Ambassador to El Salvador Nora Uribe told Prensa Latina.

In a 2006 letter to Handal’s widow Tania Bichkova, a Russian communist activist who works alongside the FMLN, Chavez expressed his administration for the deceased revolutionary.

“I pay tribute to those who risked their lives in the armed struggle like Schafik when, as (Farabundo) Marti said, the time of the ovens have arrived,” Chavez wrote to Bichkova.

Both the FSLN and the FMLN have strongly supported Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution since its inception in 1999.