SABANETA, Venezuela, (Reuters) – Venezuelan acting President Nicolas Maduro made a pilgrimage to late socialist leader Hugo Chavez’s birthplace yesterday and pledged to win the April 14 election in his honor.
“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.
Yesterday marked the start of a lightning 10-day campaign period, although both candidates already had started trying to court voters. The ballot will be the country’s first without Chavez after more than a dozen during his 14-year rule.