Venezuela election battle to find Chavez successor begins

Venezuela yesterday plunged into a bitter election fight to succeed Hugo Chavez, with acting President Nicolas Maduro and opposition leader Henrique Capriles facing off in a flurry of name-calling.

Thousands of the late president’s supporters massed outside the National Election Council as Maduro, dressed in a jacket in the colours of the Venezuelan flag, officially registered his candidacy.

“I am not Chavez, but I am his son and all of us together, the people, are Chavez,” he said.

Wearing red berets and T-shirts emblazoned with Chavez’s image, his supporters vowed loyalty to the deeply polarising socialist revolution that the former army paratrooper scripted during his 14 years in power.

“We are going to elect Chavez in the body of Maduro,” said Jesus Oliviertt, a 60-year-old retiree. “We are going to continue his work.”

Capriles, an energetic 40-year-old state governor who lost to Chavez in presidential elections in October, kept his followers off the streets but yesterday warned Maduro, “I won’t leave you an open path”.

Venezuelans will vote in snap April 14 elections after a brief campaign that analysts say heavily favours Maduro, whom Chavez picked as his successor in his last public appearance before going to Cuba for cancer surgery in December.

The Venezuelan president died March 5 and was buried on Friday in a lavish state funeral that drew leaders from around Latin America and anti-US allies like Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Long lines of mourners have filed by his casket for a glimpse of the dead president who has been lying in state since Wednesday at a Caracas military academy.

Luis Vicente Leon, director of pollsters Datanalisis, said the grief over Chavez’s death gave the government an advantage in the race.

“It will be a battle between the divine and the human,” he said.

A recent survey by pollsters Hinterlaces gave Maduro a 14-point advantage over Capriles, though the opposition leader has questioned the firm’s reliability in the past.

Capriles, a youthful, energetic lawyer and runner, drew massive crowds during the last campaign, bringing hundreds of thousands of people to the streets of Caracas for a rally in the final stretch of the race.

But Chavez was propelled to victory again thanks to his popularity among the nation’s once-neglected poor, who worshipped him for the oil-funded social programme that brought them healthcare, housing and education.

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