Chavez VP moves to fill Venezuela leadership vacuum

Vice President Nicolas Maduro is moving quickly to fill the vacuum left by President Hugo Chavez's prolonged absence, gaining valuable exposure and clout while the ailing Venezuelan leader battles cancer in Cuba. In a week of seesawing uncertainty and change, Chavez's handpicked political heir appears to have broken through the paralysis gripping the country since Chavez underwent surgery in Havana nearly a month ago. Sent off with a handclasp by the hospitalized president, Maduro returned to Caracas on Thursday and in three frenetic days rallied his party, attacked the opposition and overrode constitutional qualms about Chavez' status. And while implicitly making it understood that Chavez is too sick to be sworn in to a new term January 10, the burly, mustachioed Maduro has been all over the state-run media in a quasi presidential role. Venezuelans have seen him making speeches to red-shirted followers, watching from the visitor's gallery as Chavistas reasserted their dominance over the National Assembly, and talking in emotional tones about Chavez's difficult battle with cancer. Under the constitution, new elections must be held within 30 days if the president dies or is permanently incapacitated either before he takes office or in the first four years of his six-year term. "For the Chavista movement it is fundamental that if Maduro is to be the candidate in presidential elections because of Chavez's exit, that he do so from the position of head of state or some advantageous position, with an aura of power and control over all the institutions," said Luis Vicente Leon, the head of the polling firm Datanalisis. That transition is a tricky, however, because throughout his 19-month-long sickness, including four rounds of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment, Chavez has refused to give up power, even on a temporary basis. Maduro, 50, denies he has "personal ambitions" and has been careful to play the role as the faithful number two, effusively praising Chavez at every turn. "I think of Chavez as president," Maduro said Friday. The vice president, a man of humble origins who for a brief time was a bus driver before becoming a union organizer, owes his spectacular rise to Chavez, whose movement he joined while the future president was imprisoned after leading a failed military uprising in 1992. Maduro is also one of the few top Chavistas who has been with the president almost from the ground floor, serving as a deputy, then speaker of the National Assembly and foreign minister before being appointed vice president after Chavez's re-election October 7. "Look at where Nicolas is going, Nicolas the bus driver. He was a Metro bus driver, and how they have made fun of him," Chavez joked when he appointed him vice president. But Maduro is also a man of some parts: he and his longtime partner Attorney General Cilia Flores are followers of an Indian yogi. He is also said by analysts to be a favorite of Cuba's Fidel Castro. And he has a reputation as a pragmatist. Before leaving for Cuba in early December for his fourth and most difficult round of cancer surgery, Chavez publicly named Maduro as his political successor, leaving him in charge of the government but without transferring to him full presidential powers. Maduro "is trying to make clear that there is a political will dictated by the president and that he is the heir... because he needs to be recognized as such," Venezuelan newspaper columnist Luz Mely Reyes told AFP. Maduro's most pressing task has been to find a way around the start of a new presidential term on January 10, as mandated by constitution, if Chavez unable to take the oath of office. Maduro's solution: to simply assert that the constitution allows Chavez to put off the swearing-in until a later date and still continue in office. Calling the swearing-in a formality, Maduro said Friday that he too would remain in office without being sworn in. "I continue in office and some day when there's an opportunity to swear me in -- it's a formality -- it will be done," he said. But Reyes warns that Maduro's decision to stay in office without Chavez being sworn in "is a challenge to the governability" of the country. The move also came under fire from opposition leaders. "Our point is that the vice president cannot continue in office because (after January 10) he would be an appointee of the previous administration," said Julio Borges, the national coordinator of the opposition Justice First party. But Leon, the pollster and analyst, said there was little the opposition could do "to defend itself against an all-powerful government, that is armed, rich and in control of the country's institutions."