CARACAS: Hugo Chavez's top aides have gone on the offensive, accusing the opposition and media 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.
"The official version of what is happening is unsustainable," the head of the main opposition coalition, Ramon Guillermo Aveledo, said in an interview with AFP and digital news outlet Noticias24.
Aveledo said it would make more sense for the government to acknowledge "the truth" and use it to prepare the country for what is to come. But it "doesn't want to admit that the president is absent."
Information Minister Ernesto Villegas disclosed that Chavez, who was convalescing in Havana after a fourth round of surgery last month, was suffering from a "severe pulmonary infection" that had led to a "respiratory insufficiency."
But Vice President Nicolas Maduro made clear on his return from Cuba Thursday that there were no plans for a transfer of power from Chavez before the inauguration.
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.
Diosdado Cabello, the speaker of the Chavista-controlled National Assembly, has said the president could be sworn in at a later date before the Supreme Court.
All eyes here are on a session Saturday of the National Assembly in which Cabello was expected to be re-elected speaker, for signs of what course the government intends to take.
In a television appearance, Maduro and Cabello 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 between the two, 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. "They think that their time has come. And we have entered a kind of crazy hour of offensive by the right, here and internationally."
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 destabilizing the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela."
In Washington on Thursday, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland denied that US officials were meddling in Venezuelan affairs, but acknowledged there had been contact with Venezuelans "from across the political spectrum."
"There's no 'made-in-America' solution here. This has to be something that Venezuelans have to do," Nuland said.
Chavez was re-elected October 7 despite his debilitating battle with cancer and the strongest opposition challenge yet to his 14-year rule in Venezuela, an OPEC member with the world's largest proven oil reserves.
But he has not been seen in public since he underwent a long and complicated surgery for a recurrence of cancer in Cuba on December 11, and officials have acknowledged that his recovery has been difficult.
The rector of the Central University of Venezuela, Cecilia Garcia Arocha, proposed sending a team of medical experts to Havana to assess his condition. Opposition leader Antonio Ledezma said it should include opposition figures.
Cancer was first detected by Cuban doctors in June 2011, but the Venezuelan government has never revealed what form of the disease Chavez is battling.
Medical experts say infections are common and often fatal in cancer cases because chemotherapy treatments for the disease involve suppressing the victim's immune system, leaving the patient vulnerable.
"Up to 50 per cent of deaths of patients affected by solid tumours are provoked directly or indirectly by infections," Doctor Thierry Berghmans of the Jules Bordet Institute hospital in Brussels said in a report.
A 1990 study in the European Journal of Cancer found that "major infections" resulted directly or indirectly in 24 per cent of deaths of cancer patients in intensive care units.
- AFP/jc
