Venezuela’s opposition said on Saturday President Hugo Chavez’s prolonged convalescence from cancer in Cuba put the country’s security and sovereignty at risk and it stepped up calls for him to delegate his powers. “It is clear Chavez does not have the capacity to fully exercise his power … This is a very dangerous, nefarious precedent,” Roberto Enriquez, national president of the COPEI Christian Democrat opposition party, told reporters.
State news agency AVN released four new photographs of the 56-year-old president on Saturday it said were taken on Friday while he took a 10-minute morning walk in Havana. In the pictures, Chavez looked pale and was wearing a blue sports T-shirt and tracksuit trousers. In one he was with Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro and in the others he was holding hands with two of his daughters and then standing and talking with the pair.
Chavez’s cancer, which the charismatic socialist leader revealed on Thursday in a televised speech from Havana, has convulsed politics in South America’s biggest oil exporter ahead of a presidential election next year.
