(Image Source: Wikimedia Commons)

BY AUSTIN ALONZO

ANCHOR LAUREN ZIMA

Argentine president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Al Jazeera has the details....

“Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has been diagnosed with cancer in the right side of her neck. An official announcement on the follow-up results said the prognosis was good and the cancer has not spread.”

Fernandez de Kirchner, the wife of her presidential predecessor Nestor Kirchner, won a second term in October in a historic landslide election with more than 54% of the popular vote after four years of continued economic growth in a country often rocked by financial instability.

The cancer news came as a shock to most Argentines still grieving the death of Nestor, who passed away in October from a heart attack. The Washington Post quoted an economic adviser who fears losing Fernandez de Kirchner to poor health could derail the fragile economic progress.

“The cancer diagnosis worries Argentines precisely ‘because it’s a one-person government ... where only the president makes decisions,’ … “That’s why there’s so much doubt about what might happen.’”

Regardless, Fernandez de Kirchner and her government are optimistic about the prognosis.

CNN reports more than 95% of patients with papillary thyroid carcinoma survive for at least ten years after being diagnosed.

Fernandez de Kirchner is the latest South American leader to be diagnosed with cancer. Brazilian president Dilma Rouseff, Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez have also battled the disease in the past three years. Bloomberg reports Chavez, a staunch critic of the United States, openly wondered Tuesday night if the leaders were being infected by CIA agents.

“‘It’s very difficult to explain, even with the law of probabilities, what has been happening to some of us in Latin America,’ Chavez said in a nationally televised speech to the military. ‘Would it be so strange that they’ve invented technology to spread cancer and we won’t know about it for 50 years?”

Fernandez de Kirchner plans on undergoing surgery January 14th and will temporarily hand power over to her vice president.