Venezuela – Venezuela’s opposition leader Henrique Capriles will challenge the late Hugo Chavez’s preferred successor for the presidency of the South American OPEC nation next month, sources said on Sunday.
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Capriles will face acting president and election favorite Nicolas Maduro, and the pair have until Monday to register their candidacies for the April 14 vote.
The election determine whether Chavez’s self-styled nationalist-socialist revolution will live on in a nation that has the world’s largest proven oil reserves.
Capriles, 40, a centrist state governor, will formally announce his decision to run later on Sunday, two sources in his camp said.
“There’s a lot of negativity around. It’s going to be tough, but we’re going to do it,” one of the sources told Reuters. “Henrique’s made his decision. He’s not backing down.”
Despite his Jewish roots, Capriles is a devout Catholic, who says his faith deepened in jail. He wears a rosary and likes to visit a shrine on Margarita island each year.
Former vice president Maduro, 50, a hulking one-time bus driver and union leader turned politician who echoes Chavez’s anti-imperialist rhetoric, is seen winning the election comfortably, according to two recent polls.
Maduro pushed a snap election to cash in on a wave of empathy triggered by Chavez’s death on Tuesday at age 58 after a two-year battle with cancer. He was sworn in as acting president on Friday to the fury of Capriles.
Capriles, the boyish Miranda state governor who often wears a baseball cap and tennis shoes, lost to Chavez in October. But he won 44 percent of the vote – the strongest showing ever by the opposition against Chavez.
Capriles has accused the government and Supreme Court of fraud for letting Maduro campaign without stepping down.
Although the ruling Socialist Party is favored to win, opposition supporters are trying to raise their spirits for a month of campaigning.
“There’s no reason to think that the opposition is condemned to defeat,” Teodoro Petkoff, an anti-government newspaper editor, said on his Sunday morning talk show.
Maduro has vowed to carry on where Chavez left off.
His first official meeting on Saturday was with officials from China, who Chavez courted to provide an alternative to investment that traditionally came from the United States.
He has adopted his mentor’s touch for the theatrical, accusing imperialists, often a Chavez euphemism for the United States, of killing the charismatic but divisive leader by infecting him with cancer.
“Despite his Jewish roots, Capriles is a devout Catholic”
Oy vey another herzl style ‘jewish state’ ?
Venezuela and all S.A. countries are cinder boxes and survivor or other Jew is a target due to elevated economic class
dear kzlar it’s Sunday take a nap
Both his parents were of Jewish ancestry. His father was a practicing Catholic and a descendant of Sephardim. His mother was Ashkenazi (last name Radonski).
Besides all of your clever put-doUwns, can anyone inform us as to who is parents & survivor grandparents were and where they came from, how did they survive, etc. ? Thank you.