Hugo Chavez Taken To Final Resting Place -Saturday March 16,2013

The late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has been laid to rest at a military museum after hundreds of thousands said a final farewell in a procession through Caracas.

After over a week of lying in state, the 58-year-old's body was driven through the capital in a hearse for one last time.

Friends and family joined government and army officials as the coffin arrived at the former army barracks-turned-museum where he plotted his failed 1992 coup.

Official television coverage, streaming the procession throughout the day, cut the footage just as Mr Chavez's coffin, bedecked in a Venezuelan flag, was set to be interred.

The museum housing his body is open to the public and the government anticipates that the mausoleum will become a "place of pilgrimage for the world's revolutionaries".


On Friday, Venezuelan officials ruled out embalming the former leader and leaving his body on permanent public display in a similar fashion to Lenin.
Communications minister Ernesto Villegas wrote on Twitter: "We have ruled out the option of embalming the body of comandante Chavez after a Russian medical commission report."
The procedure would require the body to be sent to Russia and stay there for at least seven months.