Moments after he registered to run in Venezuela's April 14 election, acting President Nicolas Maduro vowed to go on foot, unarmed, into the toughest slums of Caracas and ask the gangs there to lay down their guns. Maduro and his opponent, Henrique Capriles, have clashed over a top campaign issue: the daily murders, armed robberies and kidnappings that make the South American country one of the most dangerous in the world.
"We'll go like this, with our chests bare!" Maduro cried at the campaign event, driving the crowd wild as he pulled open his Venezuelan-flag tracksuit top to reveal a red T-shirt emblazoned with the eyes of his late boss, Hugo Chavez. "We'll go without fear, to tell these youths to stop the killing, to give up the guns, to come to Christ the Redeemer!"
Fears about personal safety routinely top polls of voters' concerns in the country with the world's biggest oil reserves - despite the many programs started by Chavez during his 14-year rule aimed at bringing down the homicide figures. In a report last week, the UN Development Program said that only Honduras, El Salvador, Ivory Coast and Jamaica had worse rates than Venezuela's 45.1 murders per 100,000 people. The rate in the United States was 4.2.
The Venezuelan government concedes the country suffers more violent crime than most of the region. But it accuses opposition politicians of exaggerating the problem and shamelessly stoking fears to tarnish Chavez's socialist "revolution." On Sunday, Maduro accused the US Department of Defence and Central Intelligence Agency of plotting to assassinate Capriles and blame it on the government to cause chaos and trigger a coup ahead of the vote. Washington categorically denied it.
The opposition candidate, a 40-year-old centrist state governor who accuses Maduro of exploiting the emotion over Chavez's March 5 death in an effort to win the election, kicked off a provincial tour over the weekend. Capriles calls Maduro a poor imitation of Chavez and mocked his performance outside the electoral authority offices.
"Do you think Nicolas is going to solve the violence problem? It's not opening your jacket and saying 'I'm Superman and I'm going to go I don't know where,'" Capriles said. At the root of the country's crime problem, experts say, is a proliferation of firearms and drugs, and a weak justice system that means the majority of offences go unpunished.
Among a spate of attacks on prominent victims, a US Major League baseball player and diplomats from Mexico, Chile, Belarus and Costa Rica have been abducted in recent months. So-called express kidnappings, where targets are dragged off city streets or from their cars and taken to cash machines, or held for a few hours until a ransom is paid, are common. The government says there were 16,000 homicides nation-wide last year, but non-governmental organisations put the figure much higher.