Venezuela chooses Chavez successor

Voters who kept Hugo Chavez in office for 14 years are deciding whether to elect the lieutenant he chose to carry on the revolution that endeared him to the poor but that many Venezuelans believe is ruining the nation.

Nicolas Maduro sought to ride Mr Chavez's endorsement to victory with a campaign nearly bereft of promises but full of tributes to the polarising leader who died of cancer on March 5.

The 50-year-old former foreign minister pinned his hopes on the immense loyalty for his boss among millions of poor beneficiaries of a socialist government's largesse and the weight of a state apparatus that Mr Chavez skilfully consolidated.

The governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela deployed a well-worn, get-out-the-vote machine spearheaded by loyal state employees. It also enjoyed a pervasive state media apparatus as part of a near monopoly on institutional power.

Challenger Henrique Capriles' aides accused Chavista loyalists in the judiciary of putting them at a glaring disadvantage. Prosecutors and state regulators impoverished the campaign and opposition broadcast media by targeting them with unwarranted fines and prosecutions, they said.

Mr Capriles' main campaign weapon was to point out "the incompetence of the state," as he put it to reporters in a news conference.

Mr Maduro was still favoured to win but his early big lead in opinion polls halved over the past two weeks in a country struggling with the legacy of Mr Chavez's management of the world's largest oil reserves. Many Venezuelans believe his confederates not only squandered but plundered much of the billions in oil revenues during his time in office.

People are fed up with chronic power outages, crumbling infrastructure, unfinished public works projects, double-digit inflation, food and medicine shortages and rampant crime that has given Venezuela among the world's highest homicide and kidnapping rates.

Mr Capriles is a 40-year-old state governor who lost to Mr Chavez in October's presidential election by a nearly 11-point margin, the best showing ever by a challenger to the long-time president. He showed for Mr Maduro none of the respect he accorded Mr Chavez.

Mr Maduro hit back hard, at one point calling Mr Capriles' backers "heirs of Hitler". It was an odd accusation considering that Mr Capriles is the grandson of Holocaust survivors from Poland.