CARACAS: Nicolas Maduro succeeded the late Hugo Chavez as Venezuela’s new president yesterday, hosting a lavish inauguration after defusing opposition demands for a vote recount and winning the approval of fellow Latin American leaders.
Maduro flew home from Lima, Peru where a summit of South American presidents congratulated him on his victory in snap elections on Sunday, shortly after Venezuela’s National Election Council yielded to demands for an expanded audit of the results.
Foreign dignitaries also began arriving, including Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Cuba’s President Raul Castro, close allies of Venezuela’s leftist, anti-American leadership.
Presidents Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, Cristina Kirchner of Argentina, Jose Mujica of Uruguay and Evo Morales of Bolivia have confirmed their attendance. “19 of April day of the Fatherland today I swear to our people that I will fulfil the plan of the Fatherland and will be loyal to the ideas of (independence hero Simon) Bolivar and Chavez,” Maduro wrote on his Twitter account Friday.
Maduro, a 50-year-old onetime bus driver who rose to the heights of power here under Chavez, was to be sworn in in the country’s colonial-style National Assembly in the heart of the capital.
Hundreds of people packed the nearby Plaza Bolivar, most of them Chavez supporters bused in from the country and standing by for their new leader to speak to the nation from a stage set up outside the National Assembly.
“Maduro is Chavez’s legacy. To support him is to support the supreme commander,” said Jose Rendo, a 38-year-old electrician who came from the eastern state of Anzoategui.
A military parade and flyover in the afternoon will show off Venezuela’s small arsenal of Russian-made Sukhoi Su-35 fighter aircraft, helicopters and tanks, a routine but important ritual for Venezuela’s politically influential military.
Maduro, who campaigned as Chavez’s political “son”, was elected with a margin of victory of less than a 1.8 percent over Henrique Capriles, a 40-year-old state governor who has made rapid gains at the head of a resurgent opposition.
Opposition demands for a recount were followed by violent protests that left eight people dead, igniting a volatile political crisis in the oil-rich OPEC nation as Maduro and Capriles traded fiery accusations over who was to blame.
Late Thursday, with Maduro in Peru seeking support from a summit of South American leaders, National Election Council president Tibisay Lucena stepped in to defuse the tensions.
She announced an expanded audit of the vote in response to the opposition demands for a vote, making clear it would be based on an extensive sample of unaudited ballot boxes and not a vote-by-vote recount.
AFP
