Venezuela Holds Symbolic Inauguration for Chavez

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) —

Nothing shows the extent of Hugo Chavez’s grip on power quite as clearly as his absence from his own inauguration on Thursday.

Venezuela gathered foreign allies and tens of thousands of exuberant supporters Thursday to celebrate a new term for a leader too ill to return home for a real swearing-in.

In many ways, it looked like the sort of rally the president has staged scores of times throughout his 14 years in power. The leader’s face beamed from shirts, signs and banners. Adoring followers danced and chanted in the streets to music blaring from speakers mounted on trucks. Nearly everyone wore red, the color of his Bolivarian Revolution movement, as the swelling crowd spilled from the main avenue onto side streets.

But this time there was no Chavez on the balcony of Miraflores Palace.

It was the first time in Venezuela’s history that a president has missed his inauguration, said Elias Pino Iturrieta, a prominent historian. As for the symbolic street rally, Pino said, “perhaps it’s the first chapter of what they call Chavismo without Chavez.”

Yet in the crowd outside the presidential palace, many insisted that Chavez was still present in their hearts, testifying to his success in forging a tight bond of identity with millions of poor Venezuelans.

The Venezuelan leader, normally at the center of national attention, is so ill following a fourth cancer surgery in Cuba that he has made no broadcast statement in more than a month and has not appeared in a single photo. Officials have not specified what sort of cancer he suffers or which hospital is treating him.

Yet the opposition, limping off of two recent electoral defeats, seems powerless to challenge him, and critics see their impotence in the battle over his new inauguration as an example of how the president has been able to ignore the constitution at whim.

Despite opposition claims that the constitution demands a Jan. 10 inauguration, the pro-Chavez congress approved delaying the inauguration, and the Supreme Court on Wednesday endorsed the postponement, saying the president could be sworn in before the court at a later date.

Opposition lawmaker Maria Corina Machado called that a “well-aimed coup against the Venezuelan constitution” and echoed other critics’ suspicions that foreign allies are influencing events in Venezuela. “It’s being directed from Cuba and by Cubans,” she told The Associated Press.

Opposition leaders called for protests on Jan. 23, the anniversary of the country’s last dictatorship in 1958.

But it is unclear how much support the opposition’s complaints can generate amid an outpouring of public sympathy for the ailing president, and with Latin American neighbors either supporting the government’s stance or reluctant to step into Venezuela’s domestic affairs.

AP Photo/Ariana CubillosSupporters of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez chant slogans at a rally in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday.
Supporters of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez chant slogans at a rally in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

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