Hugo Chavez’s top aides have gone on the offensive, accusing the opposition of waging a “psychological war”, as Venezuela’s cancer-stricken President battles a serious lung infection.
The closing of ranks followed a high-level gathering of top Venezuelan officials in Havana with Chavez, amid growing demands to know whether he will be fit on January 10 to take the oath of office for another six-year-term.
Information Minister Ernesto Villegas said late on Thursday that a “severe pulmonary infection” that Chavez developed after his fourth round of cancer surgery 24 days ago had led to a “respiratory insufficiency”.
Villegas then alleged the President’s health had become the target of a campaign to destabilise the Government and reverse its socialist revolution.
In a televised statement, Villegas warned “the Venezuelan people about the psychological war that the transnational media complex has unleashed around the health of the chief of state, with the ultimate goal of destabilising the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela”.
Venezuela’s constitution calls for new elections to be held within 30 days if the President is unable to take the oath of office or dies during his first four years in office.
But Vice President Nicolas Maduro and National Assembly speaker Diosdado Cabello, the regime’s number two and three leaders, made clear on their return from Cuba that they were not preparing for a transfer of power.
“Here there is only one transition and it began at least six years ago and it was decreed by comandante Hugo Chavez,” Maduro said, referring to the launch in 2006 of the President’s Socialist revolution.
In a television appearance, both men went out of their way to deny rumours of an internal power struggle between them, with Maduro saying they had sworn before Chavez that they would remain united.
“We are here more united than ever,” said Maduro, who is Chavez’s handpicked successor. “And we have sworn before comandante Hugo Chavez, and we reaffirmed to him today in our oath ... that we would be united with our people.”
Maduro attacked a report in the Spanish newspaper ABC alleging a power struggle, and accused the opposition of “lies and manipulation, a campaign to try to create uncertainty.”
“We know that the United States is where these manipulations are being managed,” he said.
In Washington on Thursday, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland denied that US officials were meddling in Venezuelan affairs.
Nuland said Washington wants “any transition be democratic, be constitutional, be open, be transparent, be legal within Venezuela, and that it has to be decided by Venezuelans”.