Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is suffering from a severe infection and his breathing has worsened during chemotherapy, putting him in a “very delicate” state, the government said late on Monday.
The once omnipresent face of the Latin American left, now breathing with the aid of a tracheal tube, has neither emerged nor spoken in public in almost three months, leaving the oil-rich nation and the wider region on tenterhooks.
“Currently, he has a new and severe infection,” Venezuelan Information Minister Ernesto Villegas said in a statement read from the hospital, adding that there was a “worsening of respiratory function.”
Photo: Reuters
The government statement came two weeks after Chavez, 58, checked into a Caracas military hospital following two months of treatment in Cuba, where he underwent his fourth round of cancer surgery since June 2011.
Saying Chavez continues to “cling to Christ and life,” Villegas reiterated that he was undergoing “intensive chemotherapy, as well as complementary treatments,” and that his “condition continues to be very delicate.”
Chavez’s prolonged absence — which prevented him from being sworn into a third six-year term earlier this year — has angered the opposition, which accuses the government of lying about his condition.
Hundreds of people joined an opposition-led march on Sunday demanding that the government reveal more details about the condition of the president.
Officials have only released a set of photos showing him in his Havana hospital bed, smiling with two daughters, on Feb. 15, three days before his homecoming. The scarcity of images has fueled rumors about his health.
Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro and other senior officials have lashed out at the opposition and rumors that Chavez may be dead or dying, saying it is all part of a campaign to destabilize the nation.
Villegas called on Venezuelans to be on guard in the face of a “psychological war deployed by foreign laboratories with spokespeople in the corrupt Venezuelan right who seek to generate violent scenarios as a pretext for a foreign intervention.”
The government “rejects the hypocritical attitude of Hugo Chavez’s historical enemies, who have always shown him hate, insults and contempt, and who are now using his health situation as an excuse to destabilize Venezuela,” he said.
The government has sent mixed messages about Chavez’s condition, saying last week that he was still suffering from respiratory problems before declaring the next day that he had held a five-hour meeting with aides.
The opposition says it doubts the meeting ever took place.
Maduro, the president’s chosen successor, has said Chavez is “in good spirits,” while fighting for his life, and that he is communicating and issuing instructions about political and economic policies by writing and other means because of a tracheal tube.
The firebrand leader stealthily returned to the capital on Feb. 18, announcing his homecoming with a message on his Twitter account in the dead of night.
The government has never disclosed the exact nature, location and severity of the cancer, only that it was in the pelvic region.
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