Hugo: 'Yo retorno'

Chávez Returns to Venezuela, Trailing Doubts

By WILLIAM NEUMAN, NYT

CARACAS, Venezuela — In a surprise predawn homecoming, President Hugo Chávez returned to Venezuela on Monday more than two months after having cancer surgery in Cuba, potentially clearing up some of the legal questions that have roiled the nation during his long absence but doing little to dispel the deep uncertainty over who is running the country.

Mr. Chávez’s plane touched down around 2:30 a.m., according to Vice President Nicolás Maduro, and Mr. Chávez was immediately taken to a military hospital in Caracas. Employees there said he was installed as the only patient on the top floor of one wing. Members of the presidential honor guard, with their red berets, guarded the hospital’s lobby, elevators and floors.

Unlike Mr. Chávez’s other returns from treatments in Cuba, this was hardly a triumphant arrival. There were no television images or photographs of him descending from the presidential plane in a track suit and greeting officials on the tarmac, as there were in the past, raising questions about whether the government was seeking to keep a severely weakened president out of public view.

“The only thing that has changed is the location of his seclusion,” said Vladimir Villegas, a former ambassador for Mr. Chávez’s government. “The uncertainty is the same. Nothing is certain.”

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