Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez typically gives hours of televised speeches a week but for two weeks he has disappeared from public view, undergoing an emergency operation in Cuba and prompting swirling speculation in the country’s political class about who might succeed him should he die.

The government has treated the president’s departure since June 10 as a state secret, providing scant details about his condition. What Chavez’s closest associates have publicly said has only fueled speculation about the health of the man who has so dominated politics in his 12 years in power that no one successor has ever emerged, even from within his populist Bolivarian movement.

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