BOGOTA (Reuters) – Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said yesterday that he would undergo surgery for non-aggressive prostate cancer and that the tumour was caught “in time”.
“It’s a small tumour located on the prostrate gland and it’s a good prognosis, it’s not aggressive,” he said in an address to the nation.
The 61-year-old Santos said that his prognosis is for a 97 percent chance of recovery.
Santos said he planned to fly to Lima, Peru for a summit of South American and Arab leaders and then be operated on later in Bogota.
Santos is the sixth Latin American leader to have been diagnosed with cancer. The others are Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and her predecessor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Chavez had, late last year, when Argentina’s president announced her diagnosis, called the instances of cancer among Latin American leaders “difficult to explain using the law of probabilities”.
And he had pondered whether the US had “developed the technology to induce cancer and nobody knew about it”.
He then said that he was thinking aloud rather than making “rash accusations”.
