Venezuela VP: Hugo Chavez recovering after surgery
Last edited Wed Dec 12, 2012, 01:21 AM - Edit history (1)
Source: Associated Press
Venezuela VP: Hugo Chavez recovering after surgery
By CHRISTOPHER TOOTHAKER, Associated Press | December 11, 2012 | Updated: December 11, 2012 9:00pm
President Hugo Chavez was recovering in Cuba on Tuesday after an operation targeting an aggressive cancer that has defied multiple treatments and has prompted the socialist leader to name a political successor.
Vice President Nicolas Maduro spoke on Venezuelan television after the surgery, saying the operation was "complex" but was completed "correctly and successfully."
Maduro made the announcement flanked by other Chavez aides and military commanders. He then led an outdoor vigil where the president's supporters joined hands in prayer and sang along with a recording of Chavez singing the national anthem.
Addressing Chavez on television, Maduro said: "We're waiting for you here."
Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2012/12/11/hugo-chavez-cancer-surgery/1762629/
Zorro
(15,740 posts)Blackhawk44
(34 posts)if it comes to that.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)MADem
(135,425 posts)She had to send a supernumerary to a middle east thing, that's how sick she was.
Zorro
(15,740 posts)Perhaps Hillary in a goodwill gesture, although the US has not had an ambassador there for several years.
MADem
(135,425 posts)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Leon_Palmer
He's a careerist; very sharp--they've got him covering the Eastern Caribbean/Barbados circuit now.
bitchkitty
(7,349 posts)MADem
(135,425 posts)Judi Lynn
(160,545 posts)Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)If the Bolivarian Revolution doesn't survive, South America will become a land without dignity.
dipsydoodle
(42,239 posts).
bitchkitty
(7,349 posts)And vultures make me fucking sick.
Zorro
(15,740 posts)I suspect it ain't gonna help.
bitchkitty
(7,349 posts)Zorro
(15,740 posts)to canonize Saint Hugo.
bitchkitty
(7,349 posts)Zorro
(15,740 posts)bitchkitty
(7,349 posts)Do you lose your job? Or do you move on to other democratically elected, Latin American leaders?
Zorro
(15,740 posts)bitchkitty
(7,349 posts)Sorry to offend your delicate sensibilities, angel mae.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)And it's not as if there was a "free market" alternative choice that would have helped the poor and the workers anywhere near as much as the Bolivarian Revolution has.
If nothing else, the community councils are irreplaceable. They are true democracy in the way a legislature or a parliament(institutions that are always rigged to put the rich first) can never be.
Judi Lynn
(160,545 posts)Venezuela's Hugo Chavez in a tough fight after suffering complications in cancer surgery
By Ian James and Fabiola Sanchez
Associated PressAssociated Press
Posted: 12/13/2012 10:21:24 AM PST
December 13, 2012 6:23 PM GMTUpdated: 12/13/2012 10:21:26 AM PST
CARACAS, Venezuela -- Venezuela's government says President Hugo Chavez suffered complications during his cancer surgery in Cuba but is recovering.
Information Minister Ernesto Villegas says Chavez suffered "bleeding" that required, as he put it, "corrective measures."
He said on Thursday that Chavez was recovering favorably two days after the operation.
Somber confidants of President Hugo Chavez say he is going through a difficult recovery, and one close ally is warning Venezuelans that their leader may not make it back for his swearing-in next month.
Information Minister Ernesto Villegas said Wednesday night that Chavez was in "stable condition" and was with close relatives in Havana. Reading a statement, he said the government invites people to "accompany President Chavez in this new test with their prayers."
More:
http://www.mercurynews.com/nation-world/ci_22185275/venezuelas-hugo-chavez-tough-fight-after-suffering-complications?source=rss
Judi Lynn
(160,545 posts)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.
More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/13/hugo-chavez-bolivarian-dream
muriel_volestrangler
(101,321 posts)Judi Lynn
(160,545 posts)World Friday 14 December 2012 - 09:08
Chavez recovering well from cancer surgery
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez suffered bleeding during surgery for cancer in Cuba on Tuesday but is recovering well, his Communications Minister said.
Doctors have upgraded Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's condition to favourable from stable after his latest cancer surgery in Cuba, according to the country's vice-president.
"In the last few hours his process of recovery has evolved from stable to favourable, which allows us to continue saying that there is a growing recovery in Comandante Hugo Chavez's situation," Nicolas Maduro told a rally of Socialist Party supporters on Thursday.
Earlier on Thursday, Information Minister Ernesto Villegas said the 58-year-old president was recovering well two days after his operation, but that he had suffered "bleeding" that required "corrective measures".
"The patient is recovering progressively and favourably and his vital signs are normal," he said.
"This recovery process, nevertheless, will require a prudent period of time as a consequence of the complexity of the surgery performed,'' Villegas added.
Villegas expressed hope a day earlier about the president returning home for his January 10 swearing in for a new six year term, but said in a written message on a government website that if Chavez is not well enough by then "our people should be prepared to understand it''.
More:
http://maltatoday.com.mt/en/newsdetails/news/world/Chavez-s-recovering-well-from-cancer-surgery-20121214
Judi Lynn
(160,545 posts)Does Hugo Chavez Keep Fooling Venezuelans?
By Peter Hart
Dec 13 2012
The New York Times updates readers today (12/13/12) on the health status of left-wing Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, and the political implications for his country. But the paper starts out by suggesting that the people who keep electing him must have some kind of problem.
According to the Times' William Neuman, life in Venezuela is pretty dismal. Christmas tree shipments were fouled up, a government ice cream factory closed down, and "all of this happened while the economy was growing before the slowdown many predict next year."
He writes:
Such frustrations are typical in Venezuela, for rich and poor alike, and yet President Hugo Chávez has managed to stay in office for nearly 14 years, winning over a significant majority of the public with his outsize personality, his free-spending of state resources and his ability to convince Venezuelans that the Socialist revolution he envisions will make their lives better.
So people believe that, somewhere in the future, life will get better thanks to Chávez? But it's already happened for the majority of Venezuelans. As Mark Weisbrot wrote (Guardian, 10/3/12):
Since 2004, when the government gained control over the oil industry and the economy had recovered from the devastating, extra-legal attempts to overthrow it (including the 2002 US-backed military coup and oil strike of 2002-2003), poverty has been cut in half and extreme poverty by 70%. And this measures only cash income. Millions have access to healthcare for the first time, and college enrolment has doubled, with free tuition for many students. Inequality has also been considerably reduced. By contrast, the two decades that preceded Chávez amount to one of the worst economic failures in Latin America, with real income per person actually falling by 14% between 1980 and 1998.
More:
http://www.fair.org/blog/2012/12/13/does-hugo-chavez-keep-fooling-venezuelans/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=does-hugo-chavez-keep-fooling-venezuelans
Prometheus Bound
(3,489 posts)The Chavez critics here and elsewhere seem to imply that things were better pre-Chavez, that Chavez somehow ruined things, that Venezuela would be so much better if only the damn socialists would get out of the way and let the elite run things as they did in the good old days.