EL COMANDANTE: Venezuela’s acting President and presidential candidate Nicolas Maduro (left) and former Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona stand next to the sarcophagus holding Venezuela’s late president Hugo Chavez’s remains at the 4F military fort in Caracas. — Reuters photo
CARACAS: Venezuela’s government said on Friday it foiled a plot to destabilise Sunday’s presidential election, the latest in a flurry of claims that the opposition has derided as crude attempts to distract voters from the country’s problems.
Vice President Jorge Arreaza went on national television to announce that security forces had captured two Colombians posing as Venezuelan military officials who were allegedly planning to disrupt this weekend’s vote, though he did not say how.
Flanked by the military’s top brass, Arreaza held up photos of the Colombian suspects.
He also displayed about 50 assault rifle cartridges and explosives that he said were linked to a group of Salvadoran mercenaries previously accused by the Venezuelan government of plotting to kill acting President Nicolas Maduro, who is favored to win on Sunday.
“We’ve managed to dismantle a plan that would try to influence the election or the post-election period,” said Arreaza, a son-in-law of late president Hugo Chavez, whose death from cancer on March 5 triggered this weekend’s vote.
“This is wonderful news, because it means that we can all vote on Sunday in peace.”
The accusations are the latest twist in an election campaign marked by one dramatic claim after another.
In March Maduro said US officials were orchestrating a plot to kill opposition candidate Henrique Capriles as a way of sparking a coup, an accusation that Washington categorically denied.
Then came charges that the Salvadoran mercenaries were out to assassinate Maduro and sabotage the power grid to sow chaos.
The Capriles camp, for its part, warned of a government scheme to plant illegal arms and explosives on senior opposition figures in order to arrest them before the election.
Such finger-pointing has been a mainstay of Venezuelan politics since Chavez was first elected president in 1998 and began pushing ahead with a self-proclaimed ‘socialist revolution’ that pit the government against the private sector.
Chavez’s 14 years in power thoroughly polarized Venezuela, an OPEC member that sits on the world’s largest oil reserves.
Chavez himself frequently said he was the target of assassination plots, which the opposition dismissed as a tactic to distract Venezuelans from daily problems such as rampant violent crime, high inflation and deteriorating infrastructure. — Reuters