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Venezuelan acting President Nicolas Maduro made a visit to late socialist leader Hugo Chavez’s birthplace yesterday and pledged to win the April 14 election in his honour. |
“We regard Chavez as our father. He marked our life, that’s why we came here to make an oath in the land of his birth that we will never let him down,” Maduro, 50, said in the village of Sabaneta where his former boss was born.
“I am going to be president of this country because he ordered it,” Maduro added at the launch of his formal election campaign before the oil-producing South American nation’s presidential poll.
Opinion polls give Maduro, a former bus driver who rose to be Chavez’s foreign minister and vice president, a formidable lead of between 11 and 20 percentage points over opposition challenger Henrique Capriles.
The burly and mustachioed Maduro is benefiting from the personal blessing of Chavez, who named him as his preferred heir three months before dying of cancer on March 5.
That endorsement, in Chavez’s last public speech, stopped in-fighting over the succession within the ruling Socialist Party and transformed Maduro’s status in the eyes of his mentor’s passionate supporters.
“I support Maduro because Chavez left in him the hopes of solving the people’s problems, I will support him as long as he has the same feelings as Chavez,” said Carlos Guzman, a 23-year-old farmer in Barinas state in western Venezuela, which includes Sabaneta.
Maduro also has a well-financed state apparatus behind him, working-class credentials that play well with loyal ‘Chavista’ supporters, and the goodwill of millions who have benefited from Chavez’s oil-funded welfare policies or “missions.”
Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves.
Maduro’s visit to Sabaneta yesterday was a recreation of Chavez’s successful presidential re-election bid last year, when he began a series of rallies in his home village.
Accompanied by family members and political leaders, Maduro and others told stories about Chavez - recalling, for example, that he used to sell sweets on the local streets. Musicians played Chavez’s favorite “llanera” music from the plains of Venezuela which inspired much of his rhetoric and ideas.
“Nicolas Maduro will be elected on April 14 by the majority of our people to continue accelerating the revolution,” said Chavez’s elder brother, Adan, alongside Maduro in the garden of the humble home where they were brought up by their grandmother.