Maduro stands in for Venezuela's ailing Chavez in key speech

     
Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro gave a brief state of the nation address on Tuesday in place of his ailing boss, Hugo Chavez, who has not been seen in public since going to Cuba for cancer surgery more than a month ago.    

Maduro stood in for Chavez with a 10-minute speech to Congress in which he defended the president's decision to rule the OPEC nation from a hospital bed in Havana, despite opposition calls for him to step aside and name a temporary leader.    

The brevity of the speech, in sharp contrast to Chavez's nine-and-a-half-hour address last year, came as a surprise following Maduro's month-long effort to impersonate Chavez's bombastic charisma.    

Maduro offered no new information about the president's cancer, which threatens to upend Chavez's self-styled socialist revolution and convulse the political order of a country that holds the world's biggest oil reserves.    

Maduro said Chavez had named a former vice president, Elias Jaua, as the new foreign minister, a move that supporters will likely point to as a sign that the president is in control of governance despite his prolonged absence.    

Within weeks of his victory, however, the 58-year-old had to return to Cuba for more treatment. He underwent his fourth cancer operation in 18 months on Dec. 11, and has suffered multiple complications since then.


REUTERS