Our editor, Ambassador Diego Arria, and our distinguished contributor, Gustvo Coronel, the former director of the Venezuela’s national oil company PDVSA, were featured in The Daily Beast in an article analyzing the unprecedented silence of Hugo Chavez, who is being treated in Havana, Cuba, after his pelvic surgery. Hugo Chavez has been reported last week to be in a critical medical condition fighting for life after the initial pelvic surgery. Diego Arria told The Daily Beast that “either Chávez is seriously ill, and a fight is under way in the ruling spheres, or else he is lying low and planning to come back from the dead, like a savior.” If Chavez is indeed very ill then the Venezuelan opposition is facing a new political situation. Gustavo Coronel concluded that “after 13 years of systematic destruction of our institutions, democracy barely exists,” therefore “healing the country’s democracy may take” a long time. Read the entire article here
