After cancer treatment, Chavez reclaims spotlight
CARACAS — After a year shadowed by his cancer treatment, in which he appeared weakened and his strident voice was muted, Hugo Chavez, the colorful and obstreperous president of Venezuela who has made a habit of defying and taunting the United States, has found his swagger again.
This month he hosted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, embracing him as a friend, joking about nuclear weapons and laughing off the charge by the United States and its allies that Iran was seeking to develop an atomic bomb. He vowed to pull out of a World Bank arbitration process that could force Venezuela to pay billions of dollars to foreign companies, like Exxon Mobil, whose property he has nationalized.
And, in one stroke, he found a way to irk both Washington and his political oppo- nents at home, appointing a new defense minister, Gen. Henry Rangel Silva, who has been accused by the United States of supporting the drug trafficking activities of a Colombian rebel group classified as a terrorist organization by the State Department.
Throughout the summer and fall, Chavez appeared uncharacteristically frail, when he showed up in public at all. He curtailed a once busy schedule and stopped conducting his weekly Sunday television program, Alo Presidente, which for years had been a major factor in his ability to rouse his core supporters and shape the national dialogue.
But now that he says he has beaten cancer, he is asserting himself as the dominant figure in a tough campaign for reelection this year.
As if to broadcast his renewed vigor, Chavez spoke for more than nine hours in his annual address to the National Assembly this month, never sitting down, and pausing only to take questions from legislators.
Commentators said that the speech, the equivalent of a State of the Union address, was his longest ever (last year’s version was a mere seven-and-threequarters hours) and that Chavez was intent on showing voters and politicians in his own party and the opposition that his powers were not diminished.
He said as much himself, concluding his speech by reading a passage from Nietzsche on the importance of will in overcoming obstacles. He ended with his own words: “Here I am, I have returned.”
It was “vintage Chavez in campaign mode,” said Michael Shifter, president of Inter-american Dialogue, a nonpartisan policy group focused on the Western Hemisphere. “He’s basically saying, ‘I’m back, I’m in full control, this is the old Chavez.’ ”