Venezuela’s acting president said on Wednesday that “far right” figures in the United States were plotting to kill opposition leader Henrique Capriles in an increasingly volatile atmosphere ahead of an April 14 election.

Accusations are flying and emotions are running high in the South American nation of 29 million people since the death last week of former socialist leader Hugo Chavez.

“We have detected plans by the far right, linked to the groups of (former Bush administration officials) Roger Noriega and Otto Reich, to make an attempt against the opposition presidential candidate,” Nicolas Maduro said.

He gave no more details, but said in a televised speech that the government had sent a senior general to meet with aides of Capriles.

The State Department in Washington declined any immediate comment and there was no immediate response from Capriles’ camp.

Noriega, a former Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America under former President George W. Bush, denied Maduro’s accusation. “It’s absolute nonsense,” Noriega said.

“They call you what they are and they accuse you of doing what they do. That is the way they operate,” Noriega said.

Reich was not immediately available to comment. Noriega left the Bush administration in 2005. Reich was his predecessor.

Maduro did not explain why right-wing foreigners would want to bring down the business-friendly Capriles.

During the Chavez era, there were frequent claims of U.S. plots aimed at discrediting his self-styled revolution. Critics said they were a smokescreen to create a sense of “imperialist” threat and distract Venezuelans from daily problems.

The upcoming vote will pit Maduro, Chavez’s heir apparent, against Capriles, a centrist state governor who lost an election to Chavez in October.

Earlier this week, Capriles’ team said the opposition candidate had not registered his candidacy in person on Monday because they had received information that an attack against him was planned. Aides delivered his papers instead.

In January, Maduro said unidentified groups had entered the country with the aim of assassinating him and the head of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello.

And that’s not all:

In another surprising statement on Wednesday, Maduro said Chavez may even be wielding influence in heaven and have pulled strings to secure the first Pope for Latin America in Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

“We know that our commander ascended to the heights and is face to face with Christ,” he said at a Caracas book fair. “Something influenced the choice of a South American pope, someone new arrived at Christ’s side and said to him: ‘Well, it seems to us South America’s time has come.’”

Beneath all this increasingly outlandish fear-mongering, which is reflective of an increasingly desperate regime, lies the usual staggering incompetence:

Venezuela’s acting president, Nicolas Maduro, said Wednesday that it was highly unlikely Hugo Chávez will be embalmed for permanent viewing because the decision to do so was made too late and the body was not properly prepared on time. Mr. Chávez died on March 5. One embalmer said that in order to forestall decomposition a body needs to be chemically treated within hours of death — unless it is kept refrigerated. But Mr. Chávez’s body was still on display on Wednesday at the military academy where it has lain in state for a week.

So the body of Hugo Chavez will decay after all. Given that the same fate is being shared by key Venezuelan institutions, from the Chavista-dominated PDVSA state oil company through the Chavista-dominated Supreme Court all the way to the Chavista-dominated National Electoral Commission (CNE,) there is something supremely natural abut that.

Venezuela’s oil industry could deteriorate further if Nicolas Maduro, the chosen successor of late president Hugo Chavez, wins national elections next month, the West’s energy agency said on Wednesday.

While Maduro is widely tipped to become leader of the world’s top proven holder of reserves, it is uncertain how he will deal with the pressures to the oil industry left behind by Chavez, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its monthly report.

“The future of the Venezuelan oil industry, and of Venezuela itself, may well hinge on finding the right balance between the divergent needs of caring for the population and nursing a long neglected oil sector back to health,” the IEA said.

Instead of investing to improve the infrastructure of the oil sector, Venezuela has used state oil company PDVSA as a cash cow for Chavez’ expensive social programmes.

Venezuelan oil output has dropped from around 3.5 million barrels per day (bpd) when Chavez was elected 14 years ago to just 2.34 million bpd last month, according to analysts.

The death of Chavez last week did not alarm markets, but prompted debate about how the oil assets of the world’s 11th largest crude exporter will be managed in the medium term.

“Venezuela’s next leader faces a Catch 22 situation: current oil policies – namely, the diversion of oil revenues to fund costly social programmes – cannot continue without putting the oil industry – and the country’s entire economy – at considerable risk,” the report said.

“But neither can they be reversed without the risk of social unrest and political chaos.”

A lack of investment has also left the development of the Orinoco heavy oil belt, where Venezuela has a string of projects with foreign companies behind schedule.

The Orinoco belt, stretching across eastern Venezuela, is vital to lifting current production in the OPEC member to as much 4 million bpd.

The IEA expects the Orinoco developments, considered the world’s single biggest source of oil reserves, to add 1.24 million bpd of gross capacity at peak production by 2017.

But Venezuela’s net oil production capacity growth will rise by just over 200,000 bpd, to 2.8 million bpd, during the next three to four years, with the bulk of production not fully online until later, the agency said.

The IEA tipped Venezuela’s oil diplomacy programme, which provides costly subsidised oil sales to Central American and Caribbean nations, to be the first Chavez programme to break down.

These subsidies have been controversial within Venezuela and may be dropped in favour of increased exports at market prices.

In the short-term, however, the IEA expects production operations to remain unaffected with Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez continuing to head the oil sector.

“I do have a wife, you know? I do like women!” he told the crowd with his wife Cilia Flores at his side, who has served as attorney general but is stepping down to join her husband’s campaign.

Though single, Capriles has had various high-profile girlfriends in the past. He scoffs at the personal insults, saying they illustrate the government’s aggressive mindset.

More important than whether Capriles is gay is the principled stand he has taken against Chavista homophobia. Said Capriles:

“I want to reject the homophobic declarations made by Nicolás today, it’s not the first time he has made them. I believe in a society without exclusion, a society in which no one feels excluded because of what they think, their race, for their religion or for their sexual orientation. That’s fascism, completely fascist, it’s extreme right, if they want to attack me from that direction let them do it, but I’m always going to show respect to every Venezuelan because the society we want to construct in Venezuela will be one without exclusion.”

For more on “Bolivarian homophobia,” check out this grimly amusing post by Daniel Duquenal.

Zuloaga…said the station became unviable after a campaign of harassment against it, including the imposition of millions of dollars in fines.

Mr. Zuloaga said he had accepted an offer to purchase the station from Juan Domingo Cordero, an insurance broker. A price wasn’t disclosed for the station, in which the government owns 20%. Mr. Cordero couldn’t be reached for comment.

Mr. Zuloaga said the station’s license was unlikely to be renewed by the government when its license expires in two years.

Globovisión is “on the wrong side of an all-powerful government which wants to see us fail,” Mr. Zuloaga wrote. “On the contrary, we are harassed by the institutions of the state, backed by a Supreme Court which is its accomplice and collaborates in everything that can hurt us.”

The government’s information ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Government supporters, who view Globovisión as an opposition mouthpiece, backed the pending sale. “Cleaning [Globovisión] could smooth the way toward the recovery of journalism,” in Venezuela, said a message posted onto the Twitter account of former Information Ministry Andrés Izarra.

Others rued the development.

José Guerra, an economist who advises the opposition, said the sale “would leave us naked.”

Globovisión “has been the only TV channel that represents a different point of view than the party line,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington, D.C. think tank. “It would be chilling if there is no longer a TV station that isn’t aligned with the government.”

Mr. Zuloaga said the sale will take place after the April 14 vote, when acting President Nicolás Maduro will face off against Henrique Capriles, governor of Miranda state. Mr. Maduro counts on the support of the country’s media apparatus and a wave of sympathy for Mr. Chávez and is seen handily besting Mr. Capriles. Mr. Chávez, who ruled Venezuela for 14 years, died last week after a fight with cancer.

A website in Mr. Cordero’s name says he is a leader in the country’s insurance sector. He has no known experience in broadcasting. Many journalists and businessmen believe Mr. Cordero is acting at the behest of factions within the Venezuelan government.

Journalists were worried the station’s sale would further limit freedom of expression in Venezuela, following a series of government moves to consolidate media coverage. “This closes opportunities to freely express independent ideas and opinions,” said Juan Carlos Zapata, a well-known writer and journalist.

Leopoldo Castillo, a vocal government critic and host of Globovision program “Alo Ciudadano”—”Hello Citizen”—said in an editorial on air Monday, “Sadly this channel has gotten to a point where it is no longer legally viable and has gotten to being economically nonviable.”

Mr. Castillo said the Zuloaga family was concerned of its potential inability to meet its obligations to employees. In his own statement, Mr. Zuloaga said he hoped the station would have a future under its new owner.

Mr. Zuloaga fled Venezuela to Miami in 2010 after a warrant was issued for his arrest on what he said were trumped-up charges that a family car dealership had hoarded automobiles. Mr. Zuloaga had denied the allegation.

Earlier that year, Mr. Zuloaga was briefly arrested for saying on a television show that Venezuela lacked freedom of expression. He was released after an international outcry.The following year, Globovisión was fined $2.1 million for the way it covered a prison riot. The government’s media regulator said the coverage fueled public anxiety and justified crime. Just a few days ago, dozens of redshirted pro-Chávez supporters riding motorcycles circled the station.

As president, Mr. Chávez moved aggressively to take over the airwaves, opening a plethora of state-run channels that gave him supportive coverage. In 2007, the government went after private broadcasters, ordering that the license of the biggest and most outspoken broadcaster, RCTV, not be renewed. The move forced it off the airwaves. The government then later forced the channel off cable television as well.

Meanwhile, the head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee has argued that foreign broadcasts into Venezuela can help ensure that the forthcoming April 14th election is freer and fairer than it otherwise would be:

“The problem in Venezuela is when you run against the president, he has seized all the means of communications,” said California Republican Rep. Ed Royce on Bloomberg TV.

Royce referenced the most recent election in January where a member of the opposition party, Miranda state Gov. Henrique Capriles Radonski, narrowly lost to Chavez in his fourth successful bid for president.

Chavez was able to secure his roughly 12-point victory in part because of his control of Venezuelan broadcast companies, Royce says.

“If other countries or broadcasting stations can broadcast in the message of the opposition to sort of balance this,this time that popular governor who just won reelection might win the election,” he told Bloomberg’s Al Hunt. “The prior regime has so collapsed the economy – hyper inflation, devaluation of the currency, just absolutely tanked the standard of living – that there is now an opportunity if they can hear another viewpoint, especially with the last election being so close.”

The United States should be much more active in programs like those under the now defunct U.S. Information Agency, he says, tasked with broadcasting public diplomacy propaganda throughout the world.

 On Twitter Cabello accused the Governor of Miranda of having made a declaration of war and of having insulted Chávez and his family.  Everyone without a personal interest in the continuity of the regime knows that those who really insulted Chávez and his family were Cabello himself and the rest of the goons currently running the country. As Capriles pointed out last night, they couldn’t even bring themselves to hold a minute’s silence to his memory at the National Assembly session that installed Maduro as de facto president, and they are also responsible for manipulating his family to give the appearance that Chávez was recovering when in fact his life was slipping away.  And the comment about Capriles having declared war tells us  all we need to know about the coup leader’s conception of politics.

 While a snap insult was about what we might have expected from Cabello, the  reaction of Maduro was  bad even by his low standards, and he’s the one running for president, after all. He looked very nervous and  spoke in front of a portrait of his deceased boss, just to be on the safe side.   He accused Capriles, among other things, of seeking violence, of insulting the armed forces (when Defense Minister Admiral Diego Molero is a walking, talking insult to them) and of having made the biggest mistake of his life.  While Cabello acted with the verbal frugality of a real gangster who knows he doesn’t have to waste words to instill fear, Maduro tried to fill the void that is his political being without Chávez with a zigzagging diatribe full of nonsense.

It was notable also that Maduro felt compelled to reply to Capriles almost immediately. A politician with more  nous  would have waited until the  emotion produced by the noble speech made by  Capriles had dissipated a bit before saying anything.

The Cubans, however shrewd and able they are, still have a lot of work ahead  of them to transform this bumbling clown in a viable presidential candidate  and  very little time to do it in.

The BBC reports:

In a televised address, Mr Capriles accused the governing PSUV party of manipulating the recent death of Hugo Chavez.

Mr Chavez died on 5 March after a two-year battle against cancer.

Mr Capriles will stand against Acting President Nicolas Maduro, whom Mr Chavez named as his favoured successor.

Correspondents say the stage is now set for a bitter presidential campaign.

The opposition boycotted Mr Maduro’s swearing-in on Friday, claiming that – under the constitution – the speaker of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, should be the one to take over as acting president.

Mr Capriles called the move fraudulent.

On Sunday, he again accused the socialist PSUV of violating the constitution.

“My fight is not to be president, my fight is for Venezuela to move forward,” he said.

“You [the PSUV] are the ones who became sick by power. You fear losing it.”

He added: “This country cannot be built by a small group. Of course we will fight. This is the time for us all to unite.”

Mr Capriles – a lawyer by training – is governor of the state of Miranda. He describes his policies as “centrist” and “humanist”.

He and Mr Maduro must register their candidacies by Monday.

Mr Chavez – who led Venezuela for 14 years – won last October’s election against Mr Capriles, polling 54% of the vote to Mr Capriles’s 44%.

The invaluable Daniel Duquenal offers the following suggestion as to campaign themes:

Running for the April 14 election is only worth it if we make it a campaign against the CNE (the national electoral commission,) a campaign against the illegality of chavismo, a campaign to set in the public record, in front of the world, that this is a dictatorship in the making.

The big question  now is whether opposition leader  Henrique Capriles – after his barnstorming press conference last night in which he accused Nicolás Maduro of committing constitutional fraud and, in effect, being a  usurper – decides  to run or not. If he runs, he faces an uphill struggle (with the  whole apparatus of the state including the armed forces against him, how could it be any other way?) and might be accused of legitimating the usurpers currently in power. If he doesn’t, however, he risks political irrelevance in the coming years. It’s a massive call and as soon as he announces a decision it  we’ll report it here.

The future  of Venezuela is wide open and the number of viable scenarios for it is practically unlimited. They range from (at best) a return to a liberal democracy, preferably of a reforming and egalitarian bent, to (at worst) an out and out dictatorship ever more subservient to Cuba.  We need women and men with the courage and coolness to resist any move to the latter outcome and who will continue the struggle to achieve the former. With his   comments  last night , opposition leader Henrique Capriles has taken a huge step towards showing that he really wants to be the person to do exactly that.

Without wishing to disrespect the real pain experienced by the supporters of Hugo Chávez, there’s a fact we shouldn’t lose sight of: the tide of humanity that lined up to look at his remains and mourn his passing tells us very little about the real popularity of the Bolivarian political project or its chances of enduring into the future.

If we look back over the last century, there are several examples of dictators, tyrants, warlords and revolutionary leaders of various stripes whose deaths have caused massive eruptions of public grief – grief that has sometimes even included the victims of the errors and crimes of the deceased. Think, for example, of what occurred in the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin in 1953. A tide of emotion swept over the country and not even the families of the millions of dead and dying in the labor camps were able to resist the mass hysteria. Many cried their eyes out for the departed Great Father.

In saying this, I don’t mean to stay to compare Chávez with Stalin. I just want to point out that in societies that have suffered long periods of authoritarian or dictatorial leadership, and where a strong personality cult has been built around the leader, strange things have been known to happen when he dies. To put it another way, if you give me the power over a country that Chávez enjoyed in Venezuela, I guarantee that, when God calls me, the spectacle of public grief at my passing will be every bit as impressive as that witnessed in Caracas in recent days.

What happened in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death? Khrushchev won the struggle for power. In his 1956 “secret speech” to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, he condemned some of his Stalin’s crimes and began to release prisoners from the Gulag. The Soviet Union lasted until 1990, but Stalinism in its strongest sense ended shortly after the death of its founder.

In the People’s Republic of China, the death of Mao Zedong was also followed by scenes of mass grieving. There then followed years of power struggles that included attempts to continue with the catastrophic policies of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Eventually, Deng Xiaoping rose to the top and, with his slogan declaring that “the color of the cat doesn’t matter as long as it catches mice”, launched a historic series of economic reforms that turned his country into the colossus it is today, the engine room of  global capitalism. No political rights were granted to ordinary Chinese people, of course, but those  same ordinary Chinese people now have opportunities to develop their lives that their parents and grandparents could never have dreamt of, as long as they don’t take it into their heads to oppose the rule of the Communist Party.

The death of Juan Domingo Perón here in Argentina also produced massive public displays of emotion. It was followed by two years of ever more crazed terrorist violence (from both peronist and communist groups) and then by an extraordinarily savage and obtuse military dictatorship. Since the restoration of democracy in 1983, Argentina has been ruled by peronists for all but eight years. Over that time, the term “peronist” has gradually become completely void of meaning. Carlos Menem, the neo-liberal charmer, was peronist, the mafia-linked but  calm and pragmatic Eduardo Duhalde was peronist, Nestor Kirchner, the inexplicably wealthy governor from the deep south who started a return to populist rhetoric, was peronist and his widow, Christina, the self-obsessed, jewel encrusted adherent to Iran’s theories about the global power of Jews,  is a peronist too. In Argentina it’s very hard to find a viable political space that isn’t peronist in some sense or other. “Peronist” is now simply the word you have to use to describe yourself if you want to get anywhere in Argentine politics; after that, everything is up for discussion.

These few examples should suffice to demonstrate that the grieving multitudes on the streets of Caracas and elsewhere are no guarantee of anything for anyone. History didn’t start with Chávez and it won’t stop with him either.

Miguel Escalante is the pseudonym of a political analyst based in Buenos Aires.

AP reports:

Venezuela’s opposition leader is calling Vice President Nicolas Maduro a bold-faced liar and accusing him of using Hugo Chavez’s funeral to campaign for the presidency.

Henrique Capriles also said in a speech Friday that the opposition had asked to attend Chavez’s funeral but was told “better that you don’t come.”

Capriles spoke condescendingly of Maduro, calling him “boy.”

Carpiles lost the Oct. 7 presidential election to Chavez. He said he decided to speak Friday to object to the ruling earlier in the day by the country’s highest court that Maduro had become acting president the moment Chavez died.

The government announced Thursday night that Maduro would be sworn in Friday night. He will be the governing socialists’ presidential candidate in the vote to replace Chavez.

Rory Carroll and Virginia Lopez add:

Venezuela’s opposition has challenged the legitimacy of Nicolás Maduro as Venezuela’s interim president, triggering a political row just hours after Hugo Chávez’s funeral.

Opposition leaders accused the government of abuse of power and constitutional fraud in inaugurating Maduro as president on Friday night, raising the temperature in an election due to be held within 30 days.

A brief truce between the two sides in the wake of Chávez’s death broke when Henrique Capriles, a state governor who leads the opposition coalition, disputed Maduro’s right to be interim president while campaigning for the office in the snap election.

“Do you really need to abuse power to run for election?” he said at a press conference. Taunting the new president in an eerie echo of Chávez’s own rhetorical style, Capriles added: “The people didn’t vote for you, kid.”

Some opposition deputies said they would boycott Maduro’s inauguration at the national assembly, others planned to attend “under protest”. Originally he was due to be sworn in at the military academy that hosted Chávez’s funeral, but the venue was changed.

The opposition is concerned that the authority of incumbency will make Maduro, Chávez’s vice-president and designated heir, unbeatable. Polls give him a wide lead over Capriles, who is expected to be the opposition candidate.

The constitution signals that the national assembly speaker – Diosdado Cabello, a chavista loyalist – should have become interim president because Chávez was unable to assume office before he died on Tuesday after suffering from cancer for two years. Chávez was re-elected last October but never sworn in.

Cabello has been a rival to Maduro within chavista ranks, but has accepted Maduro becoming interim president.

Earlier on Friday, the supreme court, which is packed with government loyalists, said Maduro became acting president the moment Chávez died and could run for president.

Capriles denounced that ruling and called the inauguration spurious. “What the supreme court did I’ve qualified as an electoral fraud.”

The opposition leader, who lost to Chávez in last October’s election, declined to confirm that he would run against Maduro, leaving open the possibility that he would boycott the election and trigger a political crisis. He accused the court of slipping the decision past the country while it mourned.

Capriles also criticised the government’s plan to embalm Chávez and put him on display “for eternity” in a crystal urn in Caracas as not a “Christian burial”.

Below, we’ve translated a few key tweets from Spanish to give a flavor of the current debate.

https://twitter.com/DelgadoAntonioM/status/310157147491155970

“These abuses are pushing at a very narrow line that we don’t want to break”

https://twitter.com/DelgadoAntonioM/status/310157030235205633

“Nicolás, nobody elected you president “

https://twitter.com/la_patilla/status/310158903180681216

“members of the TSJ, you are not the people

https://twitter.com/globovision/status/310159018180091904

“Nicolás, what are you afraid of?

https://twitter.com/globovision/status/310159018180091904

“the vice president should step down, register as a candidate and compete”

https://twitter.com/globovision/status/310159910899953665

“the Cuban government won’t rule in Venezuela”

https://twitter.com/globovision/status/310161068213293056

“you blatantly lied to the people, nicolás”

https://twitter.com/juannagel/status/310161832709079040

“Maduro  is not the commander in chief of the armed forces”

https://twitter.com/carlosblancog/status/310162686514188288

“the CNE should  sit  the parties down and establish clear rules for the election”

https://twitter.com/ElUniversal/status/310162641987465217

“we’ll take a decision in the coming hours about what we are going to do and announce it to the country”