Road narrows for Chavez heir

Venezuela says it foiled plot to destabilize presidential vote

CARACAS, Venezuela, April 13, (Agencies): Nicolas Maduro hopes to ride a tide of grief into Venezuela’s special presidential election Sunday and win voters’ endorsement to succeed the late Hugo Chavez, the adored larger-than-life leader who chose him to carry on the messy, unfinished Chavista revolution.

That will mean inheriting multiple problems left behind by Chavez, troubles that have been harped on by opposition challenger Henrique Capriles.

Although he’s still favored, Maduro’s early big lead in opinion polls sharply narrowed in the past week as Venezuelans grappled with a litany of woes many blame on Chavez’s mismanagement of the economy and infrastructure: chronic power outages, double-digit inflation, food and medicine shortages. Add to that rampant crime — Venezuela has among the world’s highest homicide and kidnapping rates.

Maduro, a former union activist with close ties to Cuba’s leaders who was Chavez’s longtime foreign minister, hinted at feeling overwhelmed during his closing campaign speech to hundreds of thousands of redshirted faithful Thursday.

“I need your support. This job that Chavez left me is very difficult,” said Maduro, who became acting president after Chavez succumbed to cancer March 5. “This business of being president and leader of a revolution is a pain in the neck.”

Capriles, a 40-year-old state governor who lost to Chavez in October’s regular presidential election, hammered away at the ruling socialists’ record of unfulfilled promises as he crisscrossed Venezuela. His campaign libretto included reading aloud a list of unfinished road, bridge and rail projects before asking what goods were scarce on store shelves.

Programs

Maduro, 50, hewed to a simple message, a theme of the October presidential campaign: “I am Chavez. We are all Chavez.” He promised to expand a myriad of antipoverty programs created by the man he called the “Jesus Christ of Latin America” and funded by $1 trillion in oil revenues during Chavez’s 14year rule. His campaign mobilized a state bureaucracy of nearly 2.7 million workers that was built up by Chavez while he cemented a nearmonopoly on power, using loyalists in the judiciary to intimidate and diminish the opposition, particularly its broadcast media.

There are no easy answers for the troubles besetting Venezuela even though the country has the world’s largest oil reserves.

Many factories in the heartland operate at half capacity because strict currency controls leave them short of the hard currency needed to pay for imports. Business leaders say some companies are on the verge of bankruptcy, unable to extend lines of credit with suppliers abroad.

Chavez imposed currency controls a decade ago to stem capital flight as he expropriated large land parcels and dozens of private businesses. But the restrictions have backfired. In a roaring black market, dollars sell at three times the official exchange rate and Maduro has already devalued Venezuela’s currency, the bolivar, twice this year.

The government blames shortages of milk, butter, corn flour and other staples on hoarding. The opposition points at the price controls imposed by Chavez in an attempt to cool double-digit inflation.

“Chavez is unique in having survived with high popularity through years of stagflation,” said Siobhan Morden, head of Latin American strategy for Jefferies LLC.

But Maduro’s “sympathy votes will fade” eventually, Morden said. “Can he survive a six-year term with stagflation? If he feels he has to grow the economy, what will he do given the ideological constraints?”

Capriles said he will reverse land expropriations, which he said have ruined some farms and turned Venezuela into a net importer of food, including beef and coffee.

Disastrous

But even Capriles said currency and price controls cannot be immediately scrapped without triggering a disastrous run on the bolivar. As a way of immediately injecting dollars into the economy, he proposes ending the shipment of cut-rate oil to Cuba.

He said he would also re-establish close ties with the United States, which Chavez has vilified since a 2002 coup attempt that Washington initially endorsed.

Maduro made his campaign a paean to Chavez.

He followed his mentor’s playbook of blaming many of Venezuela’s woes on sabotage and subterfuge by “the extreme right,” Colombian paramilitaries, US putschists and other shadowy forces. Hard evidence is never provided. “Captured” suspects are never identified.

The government’s media machine, meanwhile, provides a pervasive message aimed at keeping Chavistas on board.

Yadaira Nunez, a 43-year-old grandmother married to a volunteer firefighter, lives with three generations in a wooden shack in a squatters settlement outside the central city of Valencia, but she doesn’t blame the government for worsening blackouts and food shortages.

Argentine football icon Diego Maradona visited the tomb of his friend Hugo Chavez on Friday and urged Venezuelans to elect the late leftist leader’s designated successor in this weekend’s presidential election.

Venezuela’s government said on Friday it foiled a plot to destabilize Sunday’s presidential election, the latest in a flurry of claims that the opposition has derided as crude attempts to distract voters from the country’s problems.

Vice-President Jorge Arreaza went on national television to announce that security forces had captured two Colombians posing as Venezuelan military officials who were allegedly planning to disrupt this weekend’s vote, though he did not say how.