Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez anoints successor and heads to Cuba for surgery
The Washington Post
Video:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez named his vice president as his chosen
successor and was heading back to Cuba on Sunday for more surgery after
announcing that his cancer has returned.
In a dour, late-night televised address on Saturday, Chavez said that his vice president and close confidant, Nicolas Maduro, would be his replacement. And Chavez, 58, told his supporters that they should vote for Maduro should a new election be called, as the constitution mandates if the president has to unexpectedly leave office.
With Maduro flanking him as he spoke before a large wooden table, Chavez then said: “I ask that of you from my heart.”
After an 18-month battle with cancer, Chavez’s announcement was the clearest sign yet that his poor health could abruptly end his self-described Socialist Revolution.
The president said that “some malignant cells” had been detected in the same pelvic region afflicted by cancer and that it has become “absolutely necessary” to undergo another surgery in the next few days in Havana. It would be Chavez’s fourth operation since he first astonished his countrymen in June 2011 by telling them that he had gone under the knife twice to remove a cancerous growth.
Moises Naim, a former Venezuelan government official and now an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, called the announcement “basically a farewell speech.”
“He said goodbye to power,” said Naim, noting the significance of naming Maduro as a chosen successor after months of roiling speculation in Venezuela over who had Chavez’s support. “It’s a statement full of resignation and appeals to God. There is no plan. The only talk of the future is that there will be elections and he asks for people to vote for Maduro.”
If Chavez is forced to leave office, it would mark the end of a tumultuous rule in which the leftist former army officer harnessed Venezuela’s considerable oil wealth to shower poor supporters with social programs while engineering a sharp diplomatic shift away from the country’s historic ally, the United States.
Chavez’s government forged alliances with some of Washington’s most intransigent adversaries, including Cuba, Iran and Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. He also has used his lock on practically all levers of power, from the courts to the congress, to push forward the nationalizations of hundreds of private companies and the seizure of wide swaths of farmland.
For Venezuela’s opposition, the possible scenarios that Chavez discussed in Saturday’s address amount to the first time the president has publicly acknowledged the severity of his illness. Indeed, the cancer has been a state secret, and on two occasions since June of last year Chavez has pronounced himself cured, without providing details.
Labels: Particularities/Peculiarities, Venezuela
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, December 09, 2012
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