No succession plan needed despite cancer: Chavez

CARACAS: President Hugo Chavez said Tuesday that despite his recent cancer diagnosis, he has no intention of putting a succession plan in place, as he repeated an earlier vow to make a complete recovery.

"The opposition and the leaders of the counter-revolution are walking around plotting, saying that Chavez is done, that he's dying, that it's time for him to hand over power, that it's for a transition even before (next year's) elections," the Venezuelan leader said.

But Chavez said such talk by his detractors of his impending demise is premature.

"With God's grace, and with the will of the people, we are going to overcome all of this," he said, vowing a full recovery from his illness.

"I promise you all, I am going to live, and I will live for a very long time," the Venezuelan leader said, a week and a half after making his surprise announcement that he had undergone surgery in Cuba to remove a malignant tumor from his body.

Chavez first went to the emergency room on June 10, in the middle of an official visit to Cuba, for a pelvic abscess, when the tumor was discovered.

He then went under the knife a second time in Havana to have the growth removed, he said.

The leftist firebrand leader was slammed by critics for convalescing for weeks in Cuba without revealing his reason for not returning to Venezuela and not handing over day-to-day governance of the country over to his vice president.

Before his cancer diagnosis, Chavez already had announced plans to run for reelection in 2012, after a dozen years as Venezuela's president.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011