LAS MERCEDES DE CUA, Venezuela — It’s almost as if nothing has changed. Back from chemotherapy in Cuba, President Hugo Chavez is again singing on television, publicly ruminating over 19th-century conspiracies against Venezuela’s independence hero and skewering his opponents with colorful barbs.
“I have come back better than I left, thanks to God,” a beaming Chavez said last weekend.
But the former army paratrooper, who celebrated his 57th birthday Thursday from the balcony of the presidential palace, has been visibly weakened by two operations in Havana and his first chemotherapy session since announcing last month that he has cancer. And after years of setbacks, his political adversaries sense that in next year’s presidential election, they might be in a position to get the upper hand against a leader who has dominated this country for a dozen years.
In a poll released last week by the Caracas firm Datanalisis, the governor of the centrally located state of Miranda, Henrique Capriles, nearly tied Chavez, 37 percent to 39 percent, when prospective voters were asked which of the two they would choose.
Capriles is using his position, and the coffers he controls as governor, to his advantage, surging ahead of others in Venezuela’s often-fractious opposition movement who want to challenge Chavez.
The telegenic 39-year-old hammers away at the government’s inability to control rampant crime and inflation, as well as what he calls the mismanagement of an economy that has been South America’s laggard despite its huge oil reserves.
But it is in campaign swings through poor districts, such as largely rural Las Mercedes in the mountains south of Caracas, where Capriles’s message has had particular resonance. Wearing a white tennis shirt and baseball cap on a recent day, he arrived by helicopter at a ballfield, where he was immediately swamped by poor villagers.
Some asked about jobs. Others wanted help with home repairs. He spoke to as many as he could before leading a pack of supporters and aides, clipboards in hand, on a sprint along rutted, unpaved roads dotted with cinder-block homes, the pastel-colored walls fading in the tropical sun.
“If we can resolve these cases, and then get to others, we’ll resolve them,” he said in his gravelly voice, as a mob of residents surrounded him.
Handing out vouchers for residents here to renovate their homes quickly won him points from Julia Pacheco, 35, who received a hug from Capriles in her living room.
“Very excellent, marvelous. He’s very good, Governor Capriles,” Pacheco said, as she held up a voucher he had given her.
Another homeowner, Alfredo Ascanio, 54, said Caprile’s message was “admirable, admirable; this is what we need, a president who looks after the people, not just himself.”
A ‘new Chavez’
In an interview, Capriles said government interventions in the economy, especially the Chavez administration’s seizure of land and nationalization of companies, have hobbled Venezuela. He also talked about the need for business-friendly policies to generate jobs. His model for Venezuela is Miranda, where his governorship has been popular.
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