WASHINGTON (AFP) - Former Polish president Lech Walesa, 64, was successfully fitted with a pacemaker Friday by a team of cardiologists in Texas, a clinic spokeswoman said.
"Mr Walesas procedure is complete and everything went very well," Erin Fairchild, a spokeswoman for the Methodist DeBakey Heart and Vascular Center in Houston, told AFP nearly four hours after surgeons began the procedure.
"The physicians are very pleased with the successful implant" of a bi-ventricular pacemaker defibrillator, she said.
The team of surgeons operating on Walesa was led by Doctor Miguel Valderrabano, an electrophysiologist.
Doctors at the DeBakey clinic earlier this week successfully implanted a stent in Walesa to unblock a coronary artery.
In October 2006, he underwent minor heart surgery in Italy to "repair a blood vessel that was a bit crooked," his son, Polish lawmaker Jaroslaw Walesa, told AFP at the time.
Walesa rose to international prominence in August 1980 when he led a strike by 17,000 shipyard workers in the northern Polish city of Gdansk, which forced the authorities to negotiate and led to the creation of the communist blocs first free trade union, Solidarity.
Solidarity grew into a massive popular movement that, at its height, claimed a membership of 10 million Poles out of a total population of around 35 million.
Walesa won the Nobel peace prize in 1983 for his part in founding Solidarity, which has been credited with helping to peacefully bring down the Iron Curtain that divided Europe into the communist East and free West for more than 40 years following World War II.
In 1990, the son of a carpenter became Polands first democratically elected president, serving one five-year term.
His trademark handlebar moustache whitened by time, Walesa today lives in Gdansk where he oversees an institute that bears his name, and travels the world to address conferences.
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