Chavez Embalmed
Venezuela's Vice President Nicolas Maduro announced March 07, 2013 that the late President Hugo Chavez would be embalmed and his body displayed forever in a Caracas military museum. Maduro compared the late president to other revolutionary leaders whose bodies also have been preserved, including Russia's Lenin and China's Mao. Others include Stalin [for a while], Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh, and North Korea's founding leader, Kim Il Sung.
Russian Orthodox [and Roman Catholic] belief is that the body of a saint does not decay, just as Muslim belief holds that the body of a martyr is incorruptible. The Council of Trent taught that "The bodies of holy martyrs and others now living with Christ, bodies which were His members and temples of the Holy Spirit, which one day are to be raised up by Him and made glorious in everlasting life, are to be venerated by the faithful; God gives men many benefits through them." St Silvan’s magnificently incorrupt body can be viewed in the Church of St. Blaise at Dubrovnik, Croatia. The beautifully incorrupt body of Blessed Imelda, the Patroness of First Communicants, can be seen in the Church of St. Sigismund at Bologna, Italy.
A Filipino mortician famous for putting the remains of dictator Ferdinand Marcos into a glass display case offered his services for Chavez, whom Venezuela wants embalmed “like Lenin.” An embalmer to the stars, Frank Malabed stressed 09 March 2013 that experts must act quickly if they wanted to successfully preserve the body of the Venezuelan leader. He said the methods employed would depend on the condition of the corpse of Chavez. “What is important is they must not delay. The longer they delay it, the more difficult it would be,” Malabed said. He was tasked to embalm the body of Marcos after he died in exile in 1989. Marcos’ body remains on display at the family’s ancestral home in Ilocos Norte.
On 13 March 2013 the Russian specialists who care for the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin told the Interfax news agency they are ready to help in the process of embalming the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. "The institute's experts have the necessary knowledge, technology and experience to perform such procedures," a member of the Lenin's Tomb team said. "As soon as they make the relevant decisions on the interstate level and all the reports are received, the specialists will be ready to travel to the site and offer their Venezuelan colleagues all the necessary help," the source added.
Nicolas Maduro announced on 13 March 2013 that the decision to embalm Chavez, which was made two days after the president died, had been taken too late. "The decision should have been made much earlier," he said. "The decision, or really the proposal more than a decision, was made as a product of love." Maduro said that although the opinion of Russian and German scientists is that it will be difficult to carry out the process, the idea of embalming him and putting him on display in a glass coffin is still not completely ruled out. “We have received top level scientists, the world’s best, from Russia and Germany, and their first opinions say it will be quite difficult to embalm him,” said Maduro in the opening ceremony of a Book Fair in Caracas.
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