Mystery over health of Venezuela?s Chavez deepens

CARACAS — The mystery surrounding the medical condition of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez deepened with the postponement of a major regional summit he was due to host next week.Officials say the 56-year-old anti-American firebrand, who has been in Cuba since beginning an official visit on June 8, is still recovering after being rushed into emergency surgery on June 10 with a painful pelvic abscess.But the postponement of the inaugural summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), which Chavez was due to co-chair on July 5-6, added to rising concern over his lengthy stay in Havana.The summit delay suggests the normally omnipresent leftist leader may not make it back to Caracas in time for massively important celebrations marking the bicentennial of Venezuela's independence from Spain on July 5.It is also a personal blow as Chavez has been one of the driving forces behind CELAC, which aims to counter the once overwhelming influence of the United States in Latin American politics, and which he hopes will further his ambitions as a regional powerbroker.CELAC was set up in February as an alternative to the Organization of American States (OAS), a regional Americas bloc which unlike CELAC includes both the United States and Canada. The decision to scrap the inaugural CELAC summit on Margarita island, off the Venezuelan coast, came the day after a video of Chavez with Cuban revolutionary icon Fidel Castro sought to plug rumors about his condition.Chavez perhaps seemed to have lost some weight but was acting his usual animated self, raising the obvious question of why a summit still a week away had to be scrapped.The president "is in the midst of a strict process of recovery and medical treatment," the Venezuelan foreign ministry said in a statement on the postponement, without providing further details.Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota said he had been informed by his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro that Chavez's condition was the reason for the summit delay."It was a

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