Thousands rally for ailing Hugo Chavez
President too ill to attend swearing-in
CARACAS — Nothing shows the extent of Hugo Chavez’s grip on power quite as clearly as his absence from his own inauguration Thursday.
Venezuela gathered foreign allies and tens of thousands of exuberant supporters to celebrate a new term for a leader too ill to return home for a real swearing-in.
In many ways, it looked like the sort of rally the president has staged dozens of times throughout his 14 years in power: The leader’s face beamed from shirts, signs and banners. Adoring followers danced and chanted in the streets to music blaring from speakers mounted on trucks. Nearly everyone wore red, the colour of his Bolivarian Revolution movement, as the swelling crowd spilled from the main avenue onto side streets.
But this time, there was no Chavez on the balcony of Miraflores Palace.
It was the first time in Venezuela’s history that a president has missed his inauguration, said Elias Pino Iturrieta, a prominent historian. As for the symbolic rally, Pino said, “perhaps it’s the first chapter of what they call Chavismo without Chavez.”
Yet in the crowd outside the presidential palace, many insisted Chavez was still in their hearts, testifying to his success in forging a tight bond of identity with millions of poor Venezuelans.
The crowd chanted: “We are all Chavez!” Some wore paper cut-outs of the yellow, blue and red presidential sash to show they were symbolically swearing in themselves, in Chavez’s place.
“Viva Chavez!” said VicePresident Nicolas Maduro, the president’s designated successor. He called for a round of applause for the president’s cabinet ministers, saying they were starting a new term, and he said of Chavez, “he’s in a battle.”
The Venezuelan leader is so ill following a fourth cancer surgery in Cuba that he has made no broadcast statement in more than a month, and has not appeared in a single photo. Officials have not specified what sort of cancer he suffers from or which hospital is treating him.
Despite opposition claims that the constitution demands a Jan. 10 inauguration, the pro-Chavez congress approved delaying the inauguration and the supreme court on Wednesday endorsed the postponement, saying the president could be sworn in at a later date.
Opposition lawmaker Maria Corina Machado called that a “well-aimed coup against the Venezuelan constitution” and echoed other critics’ suspicions that foreign allies are influencing events in Venezuela: “It’s being directed from Cuba, and by Cubans,” she said.
Opposition leaders called for protests Jan. 23, the anniversary of the fall of the country’s last dictatorship in 1958.
But it is unclear how much support the opposition’s complaints can generate amid an outpouring of public sympathy for the ailing president, and with Latin American neighbours either supporting the government’s stance or reluctant to step into Venezuela’s domestic affairs.