CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuela’s electoral council quickly certified the razor-thin presidential victory of Hugo Chavez’s successor Monday, apparently ignoring opposition demands for a recount as anti-government protests broke out in the bitterly polarized nation.
People stood on their balconies in Caracas apartment buildings banging pots and pans in protest as the electoral council’s president proclaimed Nicolas Maduro president for the next six years.
Across town, thousands of students clashed with National Guard troops in riot gear who fired tear gas and plastic bullets to turn the protesters back from marching on the city center. Students threw stones and pieces of concrete.
The city was otherwise peaceful, although protests were reported in provincial cities. There were no immediate reports of injuries.
Maduro was elected Sunday by a margin of 50.8 percent to 49 percent over challenger Henrique Capriles - a difference of just 262,000 votes out of 14.9 million cast, according to an updated official count released Monday.
By contrast, Chavez had defeated Capriles by a nearly 11-point margin in October.
“Until every vote is counted, Venezuela has an “illegitimate president and we denounce that to the world,” opposition candidate Henrique Capriles posted Monday on Twitter.
One of the council’s five members, independent Vicente Diaz, also had proposed a full recount.
But the electoral council president, Tibisay Lucena, said in announcing the outcome Sunday that it was “irreversible.” At the proclamation ceremony Monday, she called Venezuela “a champion of democracy” and defended its electronic vote system as bulletproof.
Capriles, a 40-year-old state governor, demanded Monday that the proclamation be suspended and called on his supporters to mass outside the electoral council today.
He also claimed that members of the military - “an important group in various cities” - had been detained for trying to guarantee a free and fair election. He said they had been ordered to ignore abuses they witnessed. Capriles did not offer further details, such as how many were involved.
He said his campaign’s vote count resulted in “a different result” and has received more than 3,200 complaints of irregularities - all by pro-government forces. He demanded every single ballot be recounted.
The winner is to be formally inaugurated Friday for a six-year-term.
Sworn in as acting president after Chavez’s March 5 death, Maduro squandered a double-digit advantage in opinion polls just two weeks earlier as Capriles accused the ruling Chavez supporters of running the oil-rich country into the ground.
By contrast, Chavez defeated Capriles by a nearly 11-point margin in October.
Maduro said during his victory speech Sunday night that he had no problem with a recount.
“Let 100 percent of the ballot boxes be opened,” he said. “We’re going to do it; we have no fear.”
Maduro did not, however, endorse a manual recount of individual ballots and his campaign manager, Jorge Rodriguez, repeated that position Monday.
In Washington, White House spokesman Jay Carneysaid a “100 percent audit” of the results would be “an important, prudent and necessary step to ensure that all Venezuelans have confidence in these results.”
The secretary-general of the Organization of American States, Jose Miguel Insulza, also called for a “full recount.”
Under Venezuela’s voting system, 54 percent of the tallies printed out by individual voting machines are routinely audited and that was done Sunday night, said Dashiell Lopez, coordinator of the independent voting rights group SUMATE.
Individual ballots are not included in that audit.
No independent observer teams monitored the election as Chavez’s government in recent years has rejected them. Instead it invited witnesses to “accompany the process.”
The challenger’s campaign has not yet explained how it intends to proceed with the recount demand.
Venezuelan election law does not specify how a recount might proceed or whether a candidate even has the right to demand one, said Lopez.
He said an attempt to carry out a recount in December in Bolivar state failed.
The logistics alone are daunting. A total of 39,319 boxes of paper ballot receipts were emitted by Venezuela’s electronic voting system Sunday. They are now stored in warehouses under the control of the military. Those receipts would need to be checked against vote count printouts emitted by each individual voting machine. Those results would then be checked with the electoral council’s central tally.
The electronic voting system itself was never questioned by the opposition and it has drawn praise from institutions including the Carter Center as among the most reliable.
Although the nation appeared calm Monday, the mood was tense after an often ugly, mudslinging campaign.
“We have a president today who is a political disaster who couldn’t even mobilize his people,” Julio Borges, an opposition leader, told Globovision, Venezuela’s last wholly independent TV station.
Analysts called the result a disaster for Maduro, a former union leader and bus driver who is believed to have close ties to Cuba.
He faces enormous economic challenges, as well as the task of holding together a movement built around Chavez’s magnetism.
Few outside Venezuela had bigger stakes in the race than Cuban President Raul Castro, whose country receives generous subsidized oil exports from Venezuela in exchange for sending doctors, military advisers and other help to Venezuela.
Capriles had promised to end that exchange.
Castro issued a statement congratulating Maduro for “this transcendental triumph.”
Among the problems facing the new president are chronic power failures, crumbling infrastructure, unfinished public-works projects, double-digit inflation, food and medicine shortages, and rampant crime - one of the world’s highest homicide and kidnapping rates. The opposition said that only worsened after Chavez disappeared to Cuba in December for what would be his final surgery.
Venezuela’s $30 billion fiscal deficit is equal to about 10 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
Information for this article was contributed by Fabiola Sanchez, Jorge Rueda, E. Eduardo Castillo, Christopher Toothaker and Peter Orsi of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 9 on 04/16/2013