Why watch him? A former ambassador to Cuba (2004-2006), who then served a brief high profile stint as education minister, Adán Chávez had maintained a fairly low profile in recent years. But he has suddenly re-emerged front and centre amidst President Hugo Chávez's extended stay in a Cuban hospital, where, officially, he has been recovering since 10 June from emergency surgery to remove a pelvic abscess. After days of silence from the government, he was one of the first to put a timeline on the president's return to Venezuela, suggesting after a visit to his brother in Havana that he would be back within a fortnight. The president, he said, was recovering "satisfactorily".
Adán, whose radical left-wing ideology and early guerrilla activism against the government of the time is said to have attracted his disillusioned younger army officer brother Hugo in the late 1970s, has long been considered more of a hard-liner than his brother. He has previously been described as Hugo's ‘alter ego' or as the Bolivarian Revolution's Raúl Castro, the hard-line ideologue behind a charismatic and electorally magnetic younger brother. In the early days, Adán was Hugo's private secretary and a very close advisor, though in recent years their relationship has been the subject of some rumour.
Right-wingers in Venezuela are now enthusiastically peddling the notion that Adán could be lined up (or is perhaps lining himself up) to replace his ailing brother, who is due to bid for his third consecutive re-election in late 2012. According to these, Adán may first seek the vice-presidency, currently in the hands of the young ‘Chavista' Elías Jaua, who has risen rapidly through the ranks in the past two years to become the president's number two. Others have it that Jaua is part of Adán's complot. Both are said to be close to Cuba, fuelling this sort of gossip, (though it's also been suggested that the ever-pragmatic and calculating Cuban hierarchy is none too keen on either, trusting only Hugo Chávez). Caracas is heavy on hearsay and speculation but low on facts these days and there isn't a shred of evidence for any of these increasingly wild rumours.
However, Adán's curiously-timed (and rather sinister) recent comments (on 26 June) certainly won him further attention. At a regional meeting (in Barinas) of the ruling Partido Unido Socialista de Venezuela (PSUV) he appeared to support armed battle as a legitimate tool of the Bolivarian Revolution, equating it with the ballot box.
"No one will stop the Bolivarian Revolution", he declared, before quoting Ernesto ‘Che' Guevara in noting that though the Revolution aimed to retain power via the electoral route, "it would be unforgivable to limit oneself only to the electoral and to forget other methods, including the armed battle, as a means to obtain power."
Hugo Chávez, though the leader of a failed coup d'état in 1992, was subsequently elected president by a large majority (in late 1998) and has since sought to underline his democratic credentials, returning to the ballot box again and again since taking office in 1999 in an effort to legitimize his ‘21st Century Socialist Revolution'.
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