Venezuela polls open to decide Chavez successor
One month after Chavez died, supporters of acting President Maduro played military-style bugles to wake up people before dawn and later voters stood in lines, from the capital’s hillside slums to its wealthier districts.
Venezuelans headed to the polls on Sunday to elect Hugo Chavez’s successor, with his political heir, Nicolas Maduro, hoping to continue his socialist revolution and rival Henrique Capriles vowing change in the divided nation.
You know that comandante Chavez gave me a difficult job and I accepted it like a son. I feel at peace
One month after Chavez died, supporters of acting President Maduro played military-style bugles to wake up people before dawn and later voters stood in lines, from the capital’s hillside slums to its wealthier districts.
Riding a wave of sympathy over his mentor’s death, led opinion polls as he promised to continue the oil-funded policies that cut poverty from 50 to 29 per cent through popular health, education and food programmes.
But Capriles hopes that discontent over the nation’s soaring murder rate, chronic food shortages, high inflation and regular power outages will give him an upset victory after 14 years under Chavez.
Chavez named Maduro – a former bus driver and union activist who rose to foreign minister and vice president – as his political heir in December before undergoing a final round of cancer surgery. He died on March 5 aged 58.
“We will break turnout records in our mobilised democracy,” Maduro wrote on Twitter.
Late on Saturday, Maduro presided over a ceremony in the old military barracks where Chavez was laid to rest to commemorate the late leader’s return to power after a his brief ouster in a coup on April 11-13, 2002.
“You know that comandante Chavez gave me a difficult job and I accepted it like a son. I feel at peace,” Maduro, 50, told members of a civilian militia formed by Chavez after the coup. “I will be loyal to him until the last moment.”