Weekly Report - 13 December 2012 (WR-12-49)

“Nicolás, here is the sword of Bolívar,” President Hugo Chávez said to his foreign minister, and recently appointed Vice-President, Nicolás Maduro, in an impromptu appearance on television on Saturday 8 December. This transfer of the most potent symbol of power in the Bolivarian Revolution was the climax of an inimitably circuitous address which ranged from a long preamble about Bolívar’s independence battles and Lazarus to Saturday Night Fever and John Travolta. By finally expressing his preference of who should lead the Revolution forward, Chávez sought to preclude an internecine war of succession should he fail to survive a fresh outbreak of cancer, to treat which he said, he was once again returning to Cuba.

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