Venezuelan incumbent presidential candidate Nicolas Maduro’s closing campaign rally will have a special guest on Thursday with football legend Argentine Diego Maradona giving a celebrity boost to the colourful presidential elections that will test Hugo Chavez’s populist legacy.
The opposition candidate in Venezuela’s next Sunday’s presidential again pounded on his country’s foreign policy and claimed that Argentina has a pending debt of 13 billion dollars arising from oil contracts.
A tough criminal and labor lawyer who helped win Hugo Chavez's release from prison after a failed coup two decades ago, Venezuela's former attorney general Cilia Flores has since never been far from the circle of power around the late populist leader.
Whoever wins next Sunday’s presidential election in Venezuela faces an economic time bomb with food shortages, insufficient US dollars to pay for imports and honour the country’s debt, a devastated economy full of inefficient nationalized companies and non productive farms plus mounting promises of further handouts from the government and inflation.
With less than a week for 14 April, hundreds of thousands of supporters on Sunday crammed Caracas' streets in what Venezuelan opposition presidential hopeful Henrique Capriles, trailing in the polls, called a fast-changing tide.
Ruling-party presidential candidate Nicolas Maduro said on Tuesday at the childhood home of late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez that he felt that his deceased mentor appeared to him in the form of a “little bird”, blessed him and made a strong call ‘on to (electoral) battle’.
Venezuelan government foreign currency auction for local importers has triggered de-facto currency devaluation, the second in less than 50 days, analysts said. Venezuela has had strict currency exchange controls since 2003 in an attempt to halt capital flight, under which the government sold limited amounts of foreign currency at an official rate.
Venezuelan opposition candidate Henrique Capriles claimed that acting president Nicolas Maduro with his latest decision approving a new devaluation of the local currency Bolivar is destroying the country, and he is achieving it in the hundred days he has been running the government.
The Venezuelan government said on Wednesday it has suspended a channel of communications with Washington as it escalates tension and polarizes public opinion ahead of elections to replace the late president Hugo Chavez.
Venezuelan opposition presidential candidate on Monday vowed to end the OPEC nation's shipments of subsidized oil to the Castro brothers regime in Cuba, slamming acting President as a puppet of Havana.