At Chavez's birthplace, Maduro vows to win Venezuela vote

Venezuelan acting President Nicolas Maduro made a pilgrimage to late socialist leader Hugo Chavez's birthplace on Tuesday and pledged to win the April 14 election in his honor, Reuters reported.

"We regard Chavez as our father. He marked our life, that's why we came here to make an oath in the land of his birth that we will never let him down," Maduro, 50, said in the village of Sabaneta where his former boss was born.

"I am going to be president of this country because he ordered it," Maduro added at the launch of his formal election campaign before the oil-producing South American nation's presidential poll.

That endorsement, in Chavez's last public speech, stopped in-fighting over the succession within the ruling Socialist Party and transformed Maduro's status in the eyes of his mentor's passionate supporters.

Capriles, 40, is a centrist state governor who wants to roll back the economic nationalizations and political polarization of the Chavez era in favor of a Brazilian-style model of free markets with strong welfare spending.

He was launching his campaign in the oil-producing eastern state of Monagas on Tuesday. Opposition strategists are hoping the "sympathy" effect over Chavez's death will wear off, giving Capriles a fighting chance if he focuses voters' attention on their myriad daily problems, from potholes to power cuts.