Top Venezuelan officials openly discussed the possibility Wednesday that ailing President Hugo Chavez may not be well enough for his scheduled January 10 inauguration, and the country may have to change the date of the event.
National Assembly speaker Diosdado Cabello said that while the party line of Chavez’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela was that the president will have recovered from another round of cancer surgery and take office on January 10, there was no reason to be wedded to the date.
“You can’t just tie the will of the Venezuelan people to one single day. And if you don’t do it that day, if it’s not the 10th, does the will of eight million people then have no value?” he asked in remarks published in the El Nacional daily.
“This is just my opinion; it is nothing official,” Cabello said.
But he stressed that the constitution does not specify a date for a president’s inauguration.
Earlier Wednesday, an official said Chavez is in “stable” condition after being diagnosed with a respiratory infection following his most recent cancer surgery in Cuba.
Communications Minister Ernesto Villegas said doctors had treated the infection and brought it under control, adding that it was a common consequence of “complicated surgeries” and that the ailing leader required “total rest.”
Chavez, 58, is due to be sworn in for a third presidential term next month, but the country is on tenterhooks to see if the health crisis will prevent the outspoken leader from remaining their president.
He has named foreign minister and vice president Nicolas Maduro as both his temporary replacement and hand-picked successor.
Chavez’s ruling socialist party tightened its grip on power over the weekend by winning 20 of the 23 governorships in local elections, snatching up four that had been held by the opposition.
But Chavez, who is still in Cuba following his latest surgery, has yet to publicly react to the victory.
The face of the Latin American left for more than a decade and a firebrand critic of US “imperialism,” Chavez asserted before embarking on his arduous re-election campaign earlier this year that he was cancer-free.
He was forced to tell the nation afterwards however that he had suffered a recurrence of the disease. He returned to Cuba, a key Venezuelan ally, for surgery and follow-up treatment.
Venezuela has never said what type of cancer Chavez has, nor which organs are affected, but doctors removed a tumor from his pelvic region last year.
Venezuela could postpone Chavez inauguration: lawmaker
