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Venezuela

Campaigning Ends In Venezuela As Vote Looms To Pick Chavez Successor

EFE; CLARIN (Argentina); LA TERCERA (Chile); EL UNIVERSAL, TELESUR (Venezuela)

Worldcrunch

CARACAS - Campaigns have officially closed in Venezuela ahead of Sunday’s election showdown between the heir to Hugo Chavez’s legacy, Nicolas Maduro and opposition leader Henrique Capriles.

Just five months after reelecting Chavez, the country is being called back to the polls following the death of El Comandante in March. Protests sprung up across the oil rich country during the final week of campaigning, which was required to halt by end of day on Thursday, reports Chilean daily La Tercera.

Polls predict a comfortable win for Maduro, who played to the lingering memories of Chavez, and called upon some famous faces for some last-minute campaigning, including Argentinian soccer superstar, Diego Maradona, writes Clarin.

Capriles was defeated in the October 2012 election against Chavez by some 10%. According to El Universal, Maduro sent a warning to his opponent on Thursday night, saying that should Capriles dare to ignore the results of the election, he will have the same fate as an ex-President who is now in exile in Colombia. “Now he’s toying with the idea of a coup,” Maduro said of his opponent during a visit to pay homage to Chavez.

In terms of electoral promises, writes TeleSur, Maduro declared that he will fulfill Chavez’s legacy, and “rebuild the spiritual fabric of the country.”

Meanwhile, Capriles is the change candidate, says EFE. “On Monday there will be a new Venezuela. On Monday we will embrace the future, one of hope,” said Capriles, who reminded the people during his campaign that Maduro is not Chavez.

This election has generated some rising tension both in Venezuela, and surrounding countries. With its flow of oil revenue, Caracas aids its neighbors financially and after 14 years of chavismo, this could lead to a social breakdown in the region.

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Ideas

Shame On The García Márquez Heirs — Cashing In On The "Scraps" Of A Legend

A decision to publish a sketchy manuscript as a posthumous novel by the late Gabriel García Márquez would have horrified Colombia's Nobel laureate, given his painstaking devotion to the precision of the written word.

Photo of a window with a sticker of the face of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with butterfly notes at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Poster of Gabriel Garcia Marquez at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Juan David Torres Duarte

-Essay-

BOGOTÁ — When a writer dies, there are several ways of administering the literary estate, depending on the ambitions of the heirs. One is to exercise a millimetric check on any use or edition of the author's works, in the manner of James Joyce's nephew, Stephen, who inherited his literary rights. He refused to let even academic papers quote from Joyce's landmark novel, Ulysses.

Or, you continue to publish the works, making small additions to their corpus, as with Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett and Clarice Lispector, or none at all, which will probably happen with Milan Kundera and Cormac McCarthy.

Another way is to seek out every scrap of paper the author left and every little word that was jotted down — on a piece of cloth, say — and drip-feed them to publishers every two to three years with great pomp and publicity, to revive the writer's renown.

This has happened with the Argentine Julio Cortázar (who seems to have sold more books dead than alive), the French author Albert Camus (now with 200 volumes of personal and unfinished works) and with the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. The latter's posthumous oeuvre is so abundant I am starting to wonder if his heirs haven't hired a ghost writer — typing and smoking away in some bedsit in Barcelona — to churn out "newly discovered" works.

Which group, I wonder, will our late, great novelist Gabriel García Márquez fit into?

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