CARACAS, Venezuela — Ever the showman, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez stepped off a plane from Cuba early Monday, surprising a nation still reeling from his disclosure last week that doctors had removed a cancerous tumor from his body in a “major” operation that lasted more than six hours.
“Good morning, beloved Venezuela,” the 56-year-old leftist populist said after his plane touched down outside Caracas before dawn. The event was carefully orchestrated for the state television channels that track his every move, with overjoyed ministers greeting him with hugs on the tarmac and Chavez breaking into song.
It also neatly punctuated the heroic script that the government and Chavez had set out to write as they grappled with his ordeal — that just as he had emerged victorious from bad episodes in his colorful career, he would triumph again. That it happened just in the nick of time, as Venezuela prepared for the bicentennial of its independence today, was the kind of patriotic gesture that Chavez savors.
His arrival also made clear, to an energetic opposition, as well as to those within his Chavismo movement, that he remains the dominant politician in Venezuela, even as the specifics of his illness and any future health challenges remain unknown.
Venezuela is plagued by violent crime, steep inflation, blackouts and a housing shortage. But Chavez continues to marshal the support of about half of his people, polls show.
“Even if he’s really sick and going to the hospital for cancer treatments, Chavez has to be very close to the power,” said Luis Vicente Leon, a political analyst who runs the polling firm Datanalisis. “The message for his own people, the leaders of the Chavismo, is ‘I am here, I am alive, and I am controlling power.’ “
