Venezuela ready to choose between continuity and change

Nicolas Maduro and Henrique Capriles

With all the details ready: the people is in a stage of pondering, politics remain electoral silence and national and regional expectation remain if the presidential election would ratify the continuity of Chavez or the change with Henrique Capriles, the country was ready this Saturday to choose a president tomorrow.

Venezuelan General Wilmer Barrientos, chief of electoral security military plan, said yesterday that the country is “completely calm” on the eve of the elections to choose a successor for the deceased Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Always “at these events” of election “there is some nervousness and people begin to exaggerate, but the country is completely calm,” said Barrientos, head of Republic Plan, as the program of military assistance to electoral processes is called.

Barrientos reiterated and gave “full assurance that none” of the soldiers guarding and 13,638 polling stations across the country would “participate or interfere in the voting process.”

The opposition urged the government to let the voters ponder with “ease” after rejecting again that they plan to destabilize the country, as state-government leaders are saying.

On Thursday during the end of the campaign, Maduro said the government is “removing a violence plan of right,” referring to the opposition, after announcing the arrest of a Colombian paramilitary group allegedly wanted to commit murders in Venezuela.

Maduro has a vote intention of 44.4%, compared to the 37.2% of Capriles. Choosing who gets the simple majority wins. That puts the containers at a distance of 7.2 percentage points. Capriles lost by 11 points last October in the elections against Chavez.

Yesterday the Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona visited the tomb of Chavez and called from there to all Venezuelans to vote for Maduro, whom he accompanied on Thursday in the end of the campaign in Caracas.

A total of 18’854 935 Venezuelans are called to the polls on a day which 141,000 soldiers will be mobilized.