Your hope is an admirable quality Pam, though I feel these health issues won't change the direction in Chavez, regarding seeing any sort of lights that we want him to see. He's a driven nut caught in his revolution and will use death( if it goes that way) as some sort of martyrdom for the cause. I'd bet money on it.

Other than that I feel he can't do much about our situation anyway, as I believe corruption is the main factor that knifed us in the back, not neccesarily all Chavez's doing. I fully believe there are factors that he has no control of down there, the mess in Bolivar state and its illegal and corrupt mining being one of them. There are some very powerful forces at work there imo.