Chávez undergoes third surgery as WikiLeaks gives him two years to live

While Hugo Chávez underwent his third cancer-related operation in Havana overnight Monday, new speculations about the seriousness of the Venezuelan president's health problems came to light when WikiLeaks began dumping a new batch of private correspondence on its website. This time the exposures come from a small Texas-based private intelligence-gathering organization.

WikiLeaks announced it has obtained some five million emails between officials of the Stratfor Global Intelligence firm based in Austin, Texas and founded by controversial political scientist and author George Friedman.

At a news conference in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claimed Monday that Stratfor has contracts with the CIA to help in its intelligence gathering duties and paid sources for information.

According to Stratfor, some of the emails "may be forged or altered to include inaccuracies; some may be authentic," Reuters reported.

In one email, that goes back and forth between Friedman and a senior analyst, a source is quoted as saying that the Cuban and Russian doctors who treated Chávez in Havana last June had given the Venezuelan president about two years to live.

The email sent December 5 by Reva Bhalla, the Stratfor analyst, to Friedman describes the source for the information as "anti-Chavez." She says she has taken some things the source says with a grain of salt, "but I've gotten better at reading him over the years to tell when he's feeding me shit and when he's giving useful info - his info on the VZ regime has checked out."

Bhalla reveals that Chávez's health situation is "very serious."

"The tumor started as a growth close to the prostate, it spread to the colon, which is what led to a lot of confusion" about whether to treat him for prostate or colon cancer and whether to use hormonal treatment or chemotherapy, she wrote.

Chávez acknowledged last week that doctors found "a lesion" near the place where surgeons had removed "a baseball size tumor" last summer. The Venezuelan president underwent 90 minutes of surgery Monday night in Havana, according to Reuters, who quoted unnamed sources.

In Caracas, Vice President Elías Jaua told the National Assembly on Tuesday that Chávez was in a satisfactory condition following the surgery.

Respected Venezuelan journalist Nelson Bocaranda, who has accurately reported on the president's health in the past, said in his column Monday in El Universal that a Brazilian doctor recommended by President Dilma Rousseff and her predecessor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who both were treated for cancer, flew to Havana for consultations. But according to Bhalla's source, both Russian and Cuban doctors who treated Chávez last summer clashed over how the surgery should proceed.

"The second surgery over the summer was basically the Russian team trying to clean up the Cuban team's mistakes," Bhalla says. "The Russians complain that the Cubans don't have the right imagery treatment to properly treat Chavez."

The Venezuelan president vows to run for a third consecutive term in October when he faces a sole opposition candidate, Miranda state governor Henrique Capriles Radonski.