Chávez pick Nicolas Maduro wins Venezuela election

Nicolas Maduro, the hand-picked successor of Hugo Chávez, last evening won a razor-thin victory in a special presidential election but the opposition candidate refused to accept the result and demanded a full recount.



Maduro's stunningly close victory followed an often ugly campaign in which he promised to carry on Chávez's self-styled socialist revolution, while the main message of challenger Henrique Capriles' was that Chávez put this country with the world's largest oil reserves on the road to ruin.



Despite the ill feelings, both men sent their supporters home and urged them to refrain from violence.



Maduro who has been acting president since Chávez died on March 5, held a double-digit advantage in opinion polls just two weeks ago, but electoral officials said he got just 50.7 per cent of the votes to 49.1 per cent for Capriles with nearly all ballots counted.



The margin was about 234,935 votes.



Turnout was 78 per cent, down from just over 80 per cent in the October election that Chávez won by a nearly 11-point margin over Capriles.



The Jamaican Government had been praying for Maduro to win to keep alive hopes that the PetroCaribe deal would remain intact.



Under the PetroCaribe deal, Jamaica and several other CARICOM countries get oil from Venezuela under concessionary terms.



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