Hugo Chavez weeps and calls on God to spare his life

Having dominated the continent’s biggest oil exporter for the last 13 years,
Chavez’s sickness has thrown its politics into turmoil in the run-up to the
election on Oct 7.

Flying back and forth to Havana for the radiation therapy, Chavez has been
forced to run a kind of “virtual” campaign via Twitter and
appearances on state television, while his opposition rival Henrique
Capriles tours the country.

In his speech at the Mass, Chavez soon seemed to recover his composure, joking
with his brother Adan in the congregation that few people were watching
because it was the Easter holiday, when Venezuelans typically hit the
country’s beautiful beaches.

Chavez said he had a lot of faith that his cancer would not return after his
first two operations last year – which removed a baseball sized tumour from
his pelvis – but it did.

“Today, I have more faith than yesterday,” he said.

“Life has been a hurricane … but a couple of years ago my life began
to become not my own anymore,” the president said. “Who said the
path of revolution would be easy?”

He returned to Barinas late on Wednesday from Havana, where he had undergone a
second session of radiation therapy. He said it went well and that all the
test results had been positive.

But in the absence of detailed information on his condition, Venezuelans have
hunted for clues in his appearance each time he is on state TV. One local
news website ran a large photo of his heavily perspiring brow after he
disembarked from the jet.

One Venezuelan opposition journalist who has broken news on Chavez’s condition
in the past reported that his medical team continued to disagree among
themselves over the best course, and a Brazilian blogger said he might
travel there for treatment.

Chavez’s election rival, Capriles, has mostly kept quiet about the president’s
illness, preferring to wish him a speedy recovery so that he can beat him in
a fair fight at the polls.

But the youthful state government has criticised Chavez for choosing to be
treated abroad, saying it sends a bad message to ordinary Venezuelans if he
does not trust local doctors.

Capriles, 39, took issue this week with repeated comments by Chavez and his
allies that Jesus must have been a fellow leftist radical.

“This theme is an obsession of the eternal candidate,” Capriles
said on Twitter, referring to Chavez. “This Holy Week, we should
remember Christ was neither socialist nor capitalist.”

In the latest opinion poll released last month, the president had a solid
13-percentage point lead over his opponent, but many voters remained
undecided.

Source: agencies

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