Hugo Chavez

Re "Venezuela's Would-Be Castro," editorial, Dec. 12: How naive of me to believe that the Cold War was over. Hugo Chavez happens to be the democratically elected president of a country whose corrupt two-party system had exhausted the public's patience. The elite in Venezuela have managed to steal and squander the country's wealth to the point of plunging 60% of the population into poverty. The Venezuelan people have voted for Chavez not once but twice and have also voted overwhelmingly for the changes to the constitution that he campaigned on. Nevertheless, your paper refers to this process as "political juggling acts" and "intrigues."

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced Tuesday that he will undergo surgery to repair a 1-inch "abscess" in the same abdominal area where Cuban doctors removed a cancerous tumor in June. Chavez's surprise announcement, made during an official trip to Barinas state, came amid swirling rumors published this week in Brazil's O Globo newspaper that his cancer had metastasized to his liver. "It's a small lesion, about 2 centimeters in diameter, very clearly visible, which requires new surgery, which one supposes will be less complicated than the last one," Chavez said as he visited the Santa Ines industrial complex.

Hugo Chavez is nothing if not a man of his word. The Venezuelan president promised to remove obstacles to his Bolivarian socialist revolution, be they judicial, electoral or constitutional, and that's exactly what he has done. He has successfully squeezed out his opponents in Congress -- his allies control all 167 seats -- and the Supreme Court and the National Electoral Council, which supervises elections, are stacked with his loyalists. Last year Chavez pushed through a referendum eliminating presidential term limits, and his next order of business was muzzling the press.

For more than a decade, political opponents of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez have sought to unseat the fiery populist. Yet his rivals have proved to be their own worst enemy. They've bickered among themselves, waged electoral boycotts that played into Chavez's hands, and failed to show that they understand the plight of the country's poor. But this past weekend, the opposition did the unthinkable: It coalesced behind a single candidate, Henrique Capriles, a youthful governor from the state of Miranda, to challenge Chavez in this year's presidential elections.

Rebuffing criticism of the warm greetings he exchanged with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, President Obama said Sunday that the United States, with its overwhelming military superiority and need to improve its global image, could afford to extend such diplomatic "courtesy." In a news conference capping a three-day meeting of leaders from the Western Hemisphere, Obama also said the U.S. must engage other countries through humanitarian gestures, not only military intervention.

Picking a fight comes naturally to Venezuela's demagogic president, Hugo Chavez. In the last four years, he has taken on leaders from Peru, Chile, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica and Bolivia. Now as he spars with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, Chavez seems to be hoping for a bout with his greater nemesis, George W. Bush -- a fight that, he feels, would earn him a place in the pantheon of the Latin American left.

VENEZUELAN President Hugo Chavez, who was just sworn in for a third term, is acting like a supremely confident leader. On Monday, he declared the country's telecommunications and electricity utilities would be nationalized, to the astonishment of international investors. He has demanded -- and is likely to receive -- congressional authority to rule by decree for one year, which should facilitate his goal of installing "21st century socialism" in Venezuela.

With oil prices plummeting and homicide rates soaring, it might seem like an odd time for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to ask voters to scrap limits on how long he can stay in power. After all, they rejected a similar measure a little more than a year ago, when the petrodollars were pouring in. But Chavez learned from that defeat: He changed the proposal to cover all officials, not just the president.

Pity the biographers of Hugo Chavez, who will have to figure out the answer to the baffling question of whether the Venezuelan president is a genius or a fool. Chavez's rise to power has demonstrated his brilliant instinct for rallying the country's disaffected poor, an instinct reflected in the constitutional referendum taking place Sunday.

Six months after being briefly ousted in a coup, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez appears to have strengthened his grip on power, purging dissident military officers and frustrating political opponents. His authority and Venezuela's stability will be tested today as the fractured opposition attempts to unify the country's workers in a nationwide strike that promises to be the biggest of its kind since April.

Fresh from a sweeping victory in the Venezuelan opposition's joint primary, Henrique Capriles declared Monday that the larger-than-expected voter turnout underscored the country's hunger for peace and progress, its "exhaustion" with President Hugo Chavez's divisive oratory and the vulnerability of the longtime socialist incumbent. Capriles, the 39-year-old governor of Miranda state, said at a news conference that he would run as an experienced pragmatist who will promote investment to reactivate a severely weakened economy.

Venezuelan presidential candidate Henrique Capriles easily won Sunday's primary vote to become the single challenger against President Hugo Chavez, setting the stage for an intense campaign season leading to the general election in October. Capriles, the governor of Miranda state, was declared the winner late Sunday with about 95% of the votes counted, officials said. Zulia state Gov. Pablo Perez came in a distant second. Speaking to thousands of supporters in east Caracas on Sunday night, Capriles thanked voters who "overcame obstructions and intimidation" to vote for him. "This is a country in crisis," the 39-year-old Capriles said.

The Venezuelan government tried to strike a confident pose Friday after the revelation that President Hugo Chavez had a cancerous tumor removed in Cuba unleashed anxiety and uncertainty across the South American country. Government officials said Chavez would be able to manage the affairs of state during his convalescence, with Vice President Elias Jaua declaring that the president was in "full condition to stay in charge as head of state, and I see no need to replace him. " Yet key questions about Chavez's future — and the nation's — remained unanswered.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has acknowledged that he's fighting cancer, but he won't say what kind. Chavez, who looked as if he'd lost some weight, spoke from Cuba, where he's been at a medical facility for three weeks. Officials have said that Chavez had emergency surgery June 10 for a pelvic abscess, a collection of pus -- kind of like a dangerous internal pimple -- that's generally situated in the lower abdomen. Chavez said that the abscess-removal procedure had happened, but that doctors had detected cancerous cells and had removed a tumor.

Casting more uncertainty on the health of President Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's Foreign Ministry announced Wednesday that it has canceled a summit of foreign leaders scheduled for next week that Chavez was to have presided over to mark Venezuela's bicentennial independence celebration. The ministry statement said the Latin America and Caribbean Summit on Development and Integration would not be held because Chavez is in a "process of recuperation and extremely strict medical treatment" in Cuba.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez' hospitalization and subsequent disappearance from public view while visiting Cuba has stirred rumors about the seriousness of his medical condition and controversy over whether he should delegate power temporarily. Chavez, 56, has not been seen in public since June 8, when he arrived in Havana on a Latin American tour. Two days later, he underwent surgery for a "pelvic abscess," and the Venezuelan government has offered little detail on his condition.

President Hugo Chavez said Thursday that Venezuela was expelling a U.S. Navy officer accused of passing secret information from the Venezuelan military to the Pentagon. He also accused Navy Cmdr. John Correa of encouraging Venezuelan officers to consider overthrowing the government, which weathered a brief coup in April 2002. Chavez warned that he would throw out all U.S. military attaches if further suspected espionage occurred. The U.S.

After Venezuelans rejected Hugo Chavez's attempt to amend the constitution and install himself as president in perpetuity, he vowed nonetheless to concentrate power in his hands. And he has, in predictably socialist ways. On a nationalizing spree, the government is swallowing up telecommunications and electricity industries, energy and steel. Chavez's latest move, however, has nothing to do with the redistribution of wealth and everything to do with one man's paranoia.

Last month, one of Latin America's top journalism prizes went to a man whose only known investigative coup was a recent finding that capitalism may have destroyed life on Mars. Yes, none other than Hugo Chavez, president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, waltzed off with the Rodolfo Walsh Prize, given by Argentina's National University de la Plata and named after one of the 20th century's genuine martyrs to the profession. It was hard not to suppose that the honor was promoted by Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who has lately chosen to play Tonto to Chavez's neo-socialist Lone Ranger.