COUNCILONHEMISPHERICAFFAIRS: “With Chávez’s Illness, Is the Left All Right in Venezuela?”, por Robert Valencia (Inglés)

When Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez spent a long absence from his country in Cuba earlier last year, opponents and sympathizers alike wondered about his future as his nation’s undisputed commander in chief. But mounting speculations about the exact nature and implications of his ailment proliferated. Later, it began to circulate that Chávez was suffering from an advanced case of colon cancer after information was made public by the Spanish media. After his health circumstances became known, Chávez pledged to the nation that he would continue ruling Venezuela “until 2031.” In fact, he boasted that he would consider the years between 2020 and 2030 to be his “golden decade.”
The question now is whether Chávez was just being waggish or whether he realizes that his ultimate fate is not necessarily in his hands. Many experts are asking whether Chávez’s health will permit him to keep the Bolivarian Revolution nimble, with some arguing that Chávez won’t be able to accomplish all of his visions. This is because he may have “only…two years to live,” and he may be physically unable to run for the presidency, possibly even for the 2012 electoral cycle.
Indeed, Chávez’s current health condition has fostered many questions about the expectations of his left-leaning constituency in Venezuela, a cohort that already has presented some socioeconomic problems to his leadership within the country’s widely accepted ideological bounds, some of these had helped spawn no shortage of previous diplomatic blunders and triumphs abroad.