Chavez cancer throws Venezuela into turmoil

CARACAS: President Hugo Chavez's surprise announcement from Cuba this week that he has undergone cancer surgery is rocking this oil-exporting country just a year before a crucial presidential election.

Chavez, who survived a coup attempt in 2002, announced in a video Thursday from Havana that a cancerous tumor had been removed from his body but that he was expecting a full recovery.

The news cut short a host of rumors about Chavez's health, fueled by his nearly month-long stay in the Cuban capital.

It was also a hard dose of reality for his legions of loyal supporters, who had long considered Chavez quasi-invincible and indispensable for the "socialist revolution" of South America's largest oil-producing country.

"Today I cried for my president," said Lady Hernandez, a housewife and self-labeled "Chavista" fanatic in the Caracas neighborhood known as "January 23" after the fall of the Marcos Perez Jimenez military dictatorship in 1958.

Supporters had gathered in the area's picturesque main square, and a man with a loudspeaker shouted: "Everything with Chavez, nothing without Chavez."

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro provided a few more details about his boss's health: doctors extracted all of a tumor found "in his pelvic zone," and the president's vital organs were "in perfect condition."

Maduro, who visited Chavez in Havana, told the Televen network that the president "is well on his road to recovery."

Chavez "immediately began to walk and recover his appetite... He's a warrior, he doesn't lose his sense of humor," said Maduro.

The 56-year-old -- still popular after a dozen years in power, especially among Venezuela's poor -- had already announced that he would run again in the 2012 presidential elections.

But his cancer has upended the country's political scene. Uncertainty over the president's future hits pro-Chavez forces, who fear they will be leaderless, as much as the country's anti-Chavez faction, which had made opposing the president and his policies the focus of its politics.

"It's an inflection point," notes Margarita Lopez Maya, a Venezuelan historian. "Politics has come down to earth. Superman is no longer Superman, he's a human being who has neglected his body and is paying the price."

Chavez's chief general, Henry Rangel Silva, vowed the army would remain loyal, despite a failed 2002 coup attempt to topple Chavez he dismissed as "blind obedience to some leaders whose principles are twisted."

"Of course, I guarantee the armed forces' support for the president," the head of Strategic Operational Command said Friday.

The country's vice-president, Elias Jaua, said that Venezuela has maintained "complete political and economic stability," and that Chavez "is in command of the government, has never ceased to be and will continue to be."

Copyright APP (Associated Press of Pakistan), 2011

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011