Nicolas Maduro took over as Venezuela’s acting president late on Friday in a ceremony rejected by the opposition after a tearful farewell to Hugo Chavez during a rousing state funeral for the firebrand leftist.
More than 30 heads of state paid tribute to Chavez as his body lay in state in a flag-covered coffin at a military academy, bringing the curtain down on a 14-year reign that divided the oil-rich nation.
“There you are, undefeated, pure, transparent, unique, true, alive forever,” Maduro said as his voice rose and cracked in a eulogy that both praised his mentor and railed against his opponents.
“Mission accomplished, comandante. The struggle goes on,” he said as the guests, ranging from Cuban President Raul Castro to Hollywood star Sean Penn, applauded in a ceremony filled with music, cheers and chants for Chavez.
Maduro was later sworn in as acting president at the Venezuelan National Assembly and named Chavez’s son-in-law, Jorge Arreaza, vice president before urging election authorities to “immediately” convene elections.
Maduro donned the presidential sash, his voice breaking as he said: “Sorry for these tears, but this presidency belongs to our comandante.”
The main opposition coalition boycotted the inauguration, saying that it was unconstitutional.
The ceremony set the stage for a bitter election campaign that must be called within 30 days, five months after Chavez beat a stronger challenger than he had been used to — Henrique Capriles, who will now likely face his former vice president.
The opposition has argued that the constitution calls for the National Assembly speaker to take over as interim leader.
Before the political battle began, the state funeral opened with Venezuelan conductor and Los Angeles Philharmonic maestro Gustavo Dudamel leading an orchestral rendition of the national anthem.
Several Latin American leaders, including Cuban President Raul Castro, were invited to stand in an honor guard around the coffin, which was closed and covered in the yellow, blue and red colors of Venezuela.
Chavez’s body will lie in state for seven more days and officials said it will be embalmed and preserved “like Lenin” to rest in a glass casket in the military barracks where he plotted a failed coup in 1992.
Venezuela is giving Chavez a long farewell, with hundreds of thousands of people filing past his open casket nonstop since Wednesday, one day after Chavez lost his two-year battle with cancer at age 58.
Some fainted from the heat, many spent the night outside to see the man who became a hero of the poor and villain of the rich with social programs funded by Venezuela’s vast oil wealth.
The doors reopened to the public after the funeral and the casket was half open again, allowing people to once more see his face.
In a country divided by Chavez’s populist style, opinions of his legacy vary, with opposition supporters in better-off neighborhoods angry at the runaway homicide rate, high inflation and expropriations.
Leaders from Africa and the Caribbean attended the funeral, but European nations sent lower-level delegations, while the US was represented by its charge d’affaires and two politicians from US President Barack Obama’s Democratic Party.
Although he expelled two US military attaches earlier this week, accusing them of plotting to destabilize Venezuela, Maduro welcomed US Representative Gregory Meeks of New York and former congressman Bill Delahunt of Massachusetts.
“We love all people of the Americas. But we want relations of respect, of cooperation, of true peace,” he said, calling for a world “without empires.”
Under Chavez, Venezuela’s oil wealth underwrote the Castro brothers’ communist rule in Cuba, and he repeatedly courted confrontation with Washington by cozying up to governments that shared his “anti-imperialist” worldview.
Maduro said Chavez’s body will be taken to the “Mountain Barracks” in the “January 23,” a public housing project that was a bastion of Chavez support.
The barracks will be converted into a Museum of the Revolution.
It was there that Chavez spearheaded what proved to be a failed coup against then-president Carlos Andres Perez on Feb. 4, 1992. His arrest turned him into a hero and led to his first of many election victories in 1998.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion