MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

“I’m not Chavez, but I’m his son” Maduro tells his followers

The presidential candidate addressing the crowd from the Electoral Tribunal

“I’m not (Hugo) Chavez, but I’m his son”, Venezuelan acting president Nicolas Maduro said on Monday on making official his candidacy before the Electoral Tribunal for the April 14 snap election to choose a successor to the deceased charismatic leader.

“For our Commander not one minute of silence, but one million years of struggle” pledged Maduro to a crowd of thousands who gathered outside the Electoral Tribunal in Caracas in support of Chavez hand-picked presidential candidate.

And “if necessary we will resort to arms to defend the revolution of Commander Chavez” said defiantly the former metro driver and union leader a few minutes after signing the registration form. “We are all Chavez, workers of the fatherland, Chavez for ever!”

“They (the opposition) have said that we haven’t even had a minute of silence for Commander Chavez, but we are warning them to learn to respect because the people’s heart is in deep pain, the most severe pain you can imagine”, continued Maduro.

“God forgive them because with their hatred they have no idea of the pain and harm they inflict on the fatherland. But let them not get confused: one thing is our love and Christian pardon which leaves aside the lies and hate, but another is that they should believe that our people in grief and tears is going to surrender” blasted Maduro.

He insisted nobody is going to shut up the Venezuelan people or the latent heart of a fatherland in guard, because “they want the people to depress, they want to see the people drop the flags of our commander Chavez”.

Although the official presidential campaign for the snap election does not take off until 2 April, Maduro’s registering ceremony turned into a major political rally with the government bussing thousands to the Electoral Tribunal despite the official mourning decreed by the same government to honour the deceased charismatic Chavez.

“Here I come asking for God’s blessing and from our Father Liberator (Simon Bolivar) all his energy and enlightenment and from our revolutionary leader Hugo Chavez his strength, wisdom so that I can accomplish the orders instructed to me on the evening of 8 December last year. On that day he told the people that if anything happened to his life, us here in the Earth must take his flag and his cause, and continue with the victorious battle”.

“I’m not Chavez, but I’m his son, and here I come to present the same Program that Chavez presented nine months ago” when he registered as presidential candidate for the elections he finally won last October, but physically exhausted him definitively.

Maduro said on delivering a copy of his government program to the Electoral tribunal that “I do so with tears and with pain, but also with the hopes from a people that have woken. This program for the fatherland, we will comply from 2013 to 2019”,

Monday was the last registration day and opposition candidate Henrique Capriles sent a representative to fill the form and paper work, since it was not sure if the massive and compact concentration before the Electoral tribunal building would have let him through.