Hugo Chávez's Bolívarian revolution will soldier on without him
If the president does not recover Venezuela will miss his charismatic leadership. But his dream has come to fruition
Richard Gott
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 13 December 2012 13.15 EST
The fate of Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela and the hope of progressive change in Latin America, lies in the balance. Last weekend he appeared on television to alert his people that his cancer, first diagnosed last year, had taken a serious turn for the worse, as he set off on a fresh journey to Havana for further surgery.
He was in obvious discomfort and admitted to extreme pain. Invoking the memory of his personal hero, Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century liberator of Latin America, he implied that he might not be around for the next stage of his Bolivarian revolution. He announced clearly that his successor, for whom everyone should vote when the time came, would be Nicolas Maduro, the vice-president since October and the foreign minister since 2006. Then on Wednesday, after a six-hour operation, Maduro made clear in sombre tones that the president's recovery would be a hard and complex process. The mood in Caracas and throughout the country, from government ministers to the impoverished inhabitants of the shanty towns, is now exceptionally bleak, as it begins to dawn on the population at large that the 14-year-old Chávez era is drawing to a close.
There is an immediate timetable for the weeks ahead. On Sunday there will be elections for governors of the country's 28 states, which are mostly at the moment in the hands of Chávez supporters. Then, on 10 January, there is scheduled to be an inauguration ceremony when Chávez, who handily won the presidential elections in October, would have been expected to start a new six-year term. Government ministers indicate that that might now be in doubt. There is another significant date approaching: 17 December marks the anniversary of the death of Bolívar, who died in Santa Marta, Colombia, at the age of 47, probably of tuberculosis. Might Chávez, who is 58, be holding on for just such an appropriate moment to die?
Were this to happen, the Venezuelan constitution would grind into action, causing Diosdado Cabello, the president of the national assembly and an old military comrade of Chávez, to be catapulted briefly into the presidency and charged with holding a presidential election within 30 days. The government candidate would be Cabello's rival, the Chávez-anointed Maduro.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/13/hugo-chavez-bolivarian-dream
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