He accepted the challenge with resolution, becoming a hate figure for supporters of President Hugo Ch?z in the process. Ignacio Antonio Velasco Garc? priest: born Acarigua, Venezuela 17 January 1929; ordained priest 1955; Bishop of Puerto Ayacucho 1989-95; Archbishop of Caracas 1995-2003; named a cardinal 2001; died Caracas 6 July 2003. Velasco saw his role as defender of the Church against its enemies, and he never shrank from confronting them.Ch?z launched a succession of verbal assaults, which included comparing priests to devils in disguise and likening the Church to a tumour in the body of the nation. This was ironic, as Ch?z littered his marathon speeches and broadcasts with religious imagery and allusions, and he was well aware of the conventional piety of the average Venezuelan. But Ch?z saw religion as an instrument of political reform and social justice, while Velasco upheld more traditional values.When Ch?z was briefly removed from power by a bloodless coup d’?t in April 2002, Velasco was closely identified with the military and civilian conspirators.

He was one of the signatories of the documents creating a provisional government, headed by an elderly businessman, Pedro Carmona, and he travelled to the remote Caribbean island where Ch?z was being held, in an attempt to persuade him to mend his ways.This left him in an embarrassing position when Ch?z returned to Caracas in triumph after only 48 hours, surrounded by loyal troops. Velasco tried to make the best of the situation, urging his flock to seek reconciliation with the government, which he said was committed to putting right the mistakes it had made. But this proved a vain hope, and thereafter Velasco was regarded by Ch?z’s supporters as a dangerous “counter-revolutionary”. Efforts to reach a negotiated accommodation between government and opposition failed, despite the mediation efforts not only of church leaders but of the Organisation of American States, which was alarmed at the destabilising potential for the whole region of what appeared at times to be an incipient civil war in Venezuela.In November last year, a grenade was thrown at the cardinal’s residence in Caracas. The attackers were never identified, but the political opposition had little doubt that pro-government thugs were responsible. By April this year, relations between church and state had become so tense that Velasco publicly accused the president of leading the country towards Communism.Ignacio Antonio Velasco Garc?was born in a small town on the plains of western Venezuela in 1929, entered La Vega seminary in 1941, and was sent to Italy to continue his studies at the Salesian university in Turin. He spent the years between 1952 and 1956 studying theology at the Gregorian University in Rome and was ordained there in 1955.He worked for many years as a teacher in different parts of the country, including his old school, Don Bosco College in Valencia, where he was headmaster until 1984, as well as in other parts of Latin America.

In 1989 he was appointed bishop of Puerto Ayacucho, a remote town on the Orinoco in south-western Venezuela, where he worked with indigenous communities. He finally arrived in Caracas as archbishop in 1995, and was named cardinal six years later.Even Velasco’s death provided a battleground for Venezuela’s competing political factions. As opposition figures arrived to pay their respects to the cardinal’s body as it lay in state in Caracas cathedral, they were pelted with stones and fireworks by government supporters. Demonstrators carried portraits of the dead cardinal, with added horns and forked tail. The Caracas city government sent riot police to disperse them with tear-gas and plastic bullets.Colin Harding. Charles P. Kindleberger was one of the world’s most eminent economic historians and a progenitor of the Marshall Plan.

Charles Poor Kindleberger, economist and public servant: born New York 12 October 1910; Economist, Office of Strategic Services 1942-45; Chief, Division of German and Austrian Economic Affairs, State Department 1945-47; Adviser, European Recovery Programme 1947-48; Associate Professor of Economics, MIT 1948-51, Professor 1951-76 (Ford International Professor of Economics Emeritus); President, American Economic Association 1985; married 1937 Sarah Miles (died 1997; two sons, two daughters); died Lexington, Massachusetts 7 July 2003
Charles P. During the Second World War he was closely involved in selecting European bombing targets, but in the post-war settlement he played a crucial role in the revitalisation of the economy of Western Europe.Shortly after the end of the Second World War I rented a house outside Alexandria, Virginia, and became Kindleberger’s close neighbour He was a tall, gangling man with a slight speech impediment. An American friend said to me, “Don’t ever underestimate Charlie Kindleberger. He is bright as nails and a great charmer.”With two other neighbours Kindleberger and I commuted daily in a car pool to Washington, where I was the BBC news correspondent. The car pool was a practical institution which had started in the days of wartime petrol rationing, and had continued because of the difficulty and cost of post-war parking.