Fernandez has cancer op

Argentina’s president Cristina Fernandez underwent surgery for thyroid cancer yesterday, months after she was re-elected to a second four-year term.

The government last week announced her diagnosis of papillary carcinoma, detected during a routine medical check-up just before Christmas. Doctors say the 58-year-old has a better than 90 per cent chance of recovery.

The diagnosis sparked sympathy in a country where Eva Peron, wife of former leader Juan Peron, is still revered decades after dying of cancer at the age of 33. Holding signs reading “Strength Cristina”, supporters, who rallied around Ms Fernandez after the 2010 death of her husband and predecessor as president Nestor Kirchner, gathered outside the hospital in Pilar, near the capital Buenos Aires.

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She is one of several left-leaning Latin American leaders to have cancer. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who had chemotherapy last year, speculated that the US may have developed a way to give the illness to political rivals. Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo’s lymphatic cancer is in remission and former Brazilian leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is being successfully treated for a tumour.