Caracas Chronicles

Don’t miss two strong pieces from The Economist print edition on Venezuela.

One is in the op-ed Leaders section, and focuses on Chávez’s efforts to hide the extent of his illness. The money quote is a whopper:

“He has said that he had an operation in Cuba in June to remove a lump from his pelvic area; he insists that, after four sessions of chemotherapy, he has been cured. But he refuses to reveal what kind of cancer he had, nor have any of his doctors appeared in public to offer a prognosis. The obvious inference is that the problem may be more serious than he is letting on. Some foreign intelligence sources suggest that Mr Chávez has an untreatable sarcoma.”

More impresive even is the article that discusses Chávez’s recent personnel changes. On the concentration of power in Godgiven Hair’s hands, it says:

“By putting the party machine in the hands of Mr Cabello, Mr Chávez has signalled his reliance on the military wing of his movement. Mr Cabello’s army contemporaries have risen to be generals or senior colonels, holding key troop commands. Nobody, not even the president, understands politics, the armed forces and the business world, and the way they interact, better than Mr Cabello. That makes him both a crucial ally and also a potential threat to Mr Chávez.

For that reason, he may not be allowed to take over from Mr Jaua as vice-president, nor to fulfil a longstanding ambition to replace Rafael Ramírez, who is both energy minister and boss of the state oil monopoly, Petróleos de Venezuela, with a nominee of his own.”