Venezuelan electoral officials say voters have narrowly elected Hugo Chavez‘s hand-picked successor as president in a razor-close special election Sunday.
Winner Nicolas Maduro campaigned on a promise to carry on Chavez’s self-styled socialist revolution, and defeated a two-time challenger who claimed the late president’s regime has put Venezuela on the road to ruin.
Officials say Maduro defeated Henrique Capriles by only about 300,000 votes. The margin was 50.8 percent to 49.1 percent.
Hours earlier, Maduro’s campaign had strongly hinted at victory. Campaign chief Jorge Rodriguez smiled broadly during a news conference and summoned supporters to the presidential palace, where Chavez’s supporters gathered to celebrate the late president’s past victories. And he warned that Maduro’s camp would not allow the will of the people to be subverted.
Capriles and his campaign aides immediately lashed out at Rodriguez’s comments.
Ramon Guillermo Aveledo, a Capriles campaign coordinator, suggested the government was trying to steal the election.
“They know perfectly well what happened and so do we,” he said at a hastily called news conference. “They are misleading their people and are trying to mislead the people of this country.”
A war of words erupted on Twitter.
Capriles suggested fraud was in the works , tweeting: “We alert the country and the world of the intent to change the will of the people!”
In an earlier tweet, Capriles urged his supporters not to be “desperate and defeated.”
But former Information Minister Andres Izarra tweeted, “To Miraflores! Long Live Chavez!”
Independent security analyst Rocio San Miguel tweeted that Interior Minister Nestor Reverol was also meeting with senior military commanders.
Bill Richardson, the former New Mexico governor and longtime U.S. ambassador-at-large who came to witness the election, told The Associated Press that both candidates had assured him they would respect the outcome of the vote.
“I’m not here as an election observer, but I met with both candidates — Maduro, yesterday, and Capriles today. And I’m hopeful because both told me they would respect the rule of law and the will of the people,” Richardson said.
Maduro, the 50-year-old longtime foreign minister to Chavez, pinned his hopes on the immense loyalty for his boss among millions of poor beneficiaries of government largesse and the powerful state apparatus that Chavez skillfully consolidated.
Maduro’s campaign was mostly a near-religious homage to the man he called “the redeemer of the Americas,” who succumbed to cancer March 5. He blamed Venezuela‘s myriad woes on vague plots by alleged saboteurs that the government never identified.
Capriles’ main campaign weapon was to simply emphasize “the incompetence of the state,” as he put it to reporters Saturday night.
Maduro’s big lead in opinion polls was cut in half over the past two weeks in a country struggling with the legacy of Chavez’s management of the world’s largest oil reserves.
Millions of Venezuelans were lifted out of poverty under Chavez, but many also believe his government not only squandered, but plundered, much of the $1 trillion in oil revenues during his tenure.
Venezuelans are afflicted by chronic power outages, crumbling infrastructure, unfinished public works projects, double-digit inflation, food and medicine shortages, and rampant
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/1OnOr2i-dqw/
Meet the new boss: 
Police in Caracas fired tear gas to disperse furious opposition supporters after Venezuelan electoral authorities decided there would be no recount of the presidential