HE HAS called former US president George W Bush the Devil and referred to incumbent Barack Obama as a clown.
But Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s swipes at his neighbours to the north took an unusual turn this week, when he suggested that Washington might be behind several cases of cancer among Latin American heads of state.
“Would it be so strange that they’ve invented the technology to spread cancer and we won’t know about it for 50 years?” Mr Chávez asked, a day after Argentina’s president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner announced she had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer and would undergo surgery in January.
Speaking during an end-of-year address to the armed forces, Mr Chávez hinted that an incidence of the disease among the region’s leaders could be a US plot. But he advanced no proof and did not want to make “reckless” accusations.
“I repeat [that] I am not accusing anyone. I am simply taking advantage of my freedom to reflect and air my opinions faced with some very strange and hard-to-explain goings-on,” he said at the event, which was broadcast live on state television.
In recent years a series of left-wing Latin American leaders have been diagnosed with cancer, including Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff, Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo, and former Brazilian leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. In late June Chávez admitted he was also being treated for cancer.
“I don’t know but . . . it is very odd than we have seen Lugo affected by cancer, Dilma when she was [presidential] candidate, me, going into an election year, not long ago Lula and now Cristina,” Mr Chávez said this week.
“It is very hard to explain, even with the law of probabilities, what has been happening to some leaders in Latin America. It’s at the very least strange, very strange.”
Despite no evidence Mr Chávez hinted that other Latin American leaders should be vigilant. He recalled how US doctors could have infected 2,500 Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases during the 1940s and said he had received a warning from Cuba’s former leader Fidel Castro, reputedly the target of dozens of failed assassination plots, including a fungus-infected diving suit and an exploding cigar.
“Fidel always told me, ‘Chávez, take care. These people have developed technology . . . Take care what you eat, what they give you to eat . . . they inject you with I don’t know what,’ ” he said.