CARACAS, Venezuela - A spectator rushed the stage and pushed Venezuela’s newpresident away from the microphone as he delivered his inaugural address Friday, startling millions watching on national television before the intruder was tackled and dragged away.
The red-jacketed man appeared to be trying to address the crowd instead of attacking President Nicolas Maduro, but the interruption raised instant fears of assassination.
“He could have shot me here,” Maduro said, dressing down his security detail before continuing with his address.
Barely five minutes into the speech, the man in a red, longsleeved jacket ran on stage and said “Nicolas, my name is Jenry” before security converged from all sides.
The broadcast on state television cut away, then returned to the lectern and Maduro, who continued his speech.
The incident marred the ceremony in which Venezuela’s ruling party was to cement its grip on power. The socialist government packed thousands of red-clad supporters into the streets outside the inauguration of late leader Hugo Chavez’s hand-picked successor, who is battling to establish his own authority.
The opposition boycotted Maduro’s swearing-in, hoping that the ruling party’s last-minute decision to allow an audit of nearly half the vote couldchange the result in the disputed presidential election.
Opposition candidate Henrique Capriles said the audit announced Thursday night will prove he won the presidency. Government officials appeared to be confident there will be no reversal of the result by a weeks-long audit that’s to begin days after Maduro’s swearing-in.
Still, the audit was a sudden reversal for a government that insisted all week that there would be no review of Sunday’s vote and took a hard line against the opposition and was accused of brutal treatment of protesters.
Even if it leaves the vote standing and calms tensions, the recount will strengthen Venezuela’s opposition against a president whose narrow victory left him far weaker than his widely popular predecessor, analysts said. That will complicate Maduro’s effort to consolidate control of a country struggling with shortages of food and medicines, chronic power failures, one of the world’s highest homicide and kidnapping rates, and inflation that’s around 25 percent and accelerating.
“The most significant thing to emerge from this is the political victory” for the opposition, said Maria Isabel Puerta, a political science professor at the University of Carabobo. “The opposition’s role is strengthened and Capriles’ leadership is consolidated.”
Maduro, 50, was declared the winner of Sunday’s election by a slim 267,000-vote margin out of 14.9 million ballots cast. That did not include more than 100,000 votes cast abroad, where more than 90 percent were cast for Capriles in an election against Chavezlast October.
Venezuelans voted on computers that issued paper receipts used to confirm the accuracy of the electronic vote. Authorities checked 54 percent of the electronic vote against the paper receipts and registers containing the names, signatures and fingerprints of each voter.
Venezuela’s National Electoral Council said just before the start of an emergency meeting of South American leaders in Lima, Peru, that it would audit the 46 percent of the vote not already scrutinized on election night. An electoral official said the new process, to start next week, would replicate the one from election night.
Capriles has alleged a series of vote irregularities, some of which he said would be turned up by a new audit, such as charges that there was damage to 3,535 voting machines, representing 189,982 votes, and that voting rolls included 600,000 dead people. He said many of those irregularities took place in polling locations that weren’t audited on Election Day.
Capriles had demanded a full vote-by-vote recount but said he accepted the ruling.
“We are where we want to be,” Capriles said at a news conference after the Thursday night announcement. “I think I will have the universe of voters needed to get where I want to be.”
The South American leaders meeting in Lima wound up endorsing Maduro’s victory.
Information for this article was contributed by Fabiola Sanchez, Eduardo Castillo, Christopher Toothaker and Frank Bajak of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 9 on 04/20/2013