VATICAN CITY (AP) — The first pope from South America says he is worried about Venezuela and is urging politicians there to use dialogue and work for reconciliation following the election after the long rule of the late Hugo Chavez.

Pope Francis told a crowd in St. Peter’s Square Sunday that he was closely following events, with concern and with hope that Venezuelans can find “the just and peaceful ways to overcome a moment of grave difficulty.” Venezuela’s government says it will permit an audit of the razor-thin victory of the new Socialist president, Nicolas Maduro. The opposition insists he won by fraud.

Francis urged politicians to reject any kind of violence and establish dialogue.

In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez’s hand-picked successor Nicolas Maduro won a razor-thin victory in Sunday’s presidential election. Opposition candidate Henrique Capriles said that he would only accept the results after a full recount. At least 33 people were killed in a deadly bus crash in Peru. The packed passenger bus went off a cliff. Police suspect the crash may have been caused by the bus’ condition and driver error. Chile’s former president Michelle Bachelet is ready for another go at the helm. At a massive rally in Santiago, Bachelet accepted the Socialist party’s nomination and launched her campaign. And people in Peru drummed their way to a world record. More than 1500 people turned out in Lima to break the Guinness world record for largest number of “cajon” percussion players.

More than two dozen buses with an estimated 2,100 voters departed from Doral on Saturday. They chanted the name of the opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles, and played Venezuelan music. Others had coolers filled with food and drinks for the 16-hour drive.

“I feel this is something I must do,” said Vivian Koenig, 21, before getting on a bus.

With just six weeks of preparation, Venezuelans in Florida have raised money and arranged travel. Aside from bus, many are traveling by car and plane. Organizers said they expected a turnout similar or higher than that of October, when 8,500 Venezuelans cast ballots in New Orleans.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez died in March after a two-year battle with cancer. His chosen successor, interim President Nicolas Maduro, is favored to win, but opinion polls show Capriles has narrowed Maduro’s advantage, rallying voters frustrated with chronic food shortages, inflation, power outages and surging crime that many blame on Chavez’s mismanagement.

“It’s been pretty amazing how people have responded since the first announcement that Chavez died,” said Gilda Sollami of Voto Donde Sea, a group of students and young professionals that promotes voting outside Venezuela. “They showed a lot of interest.”

RELATED: Analysis: If Maduro wins Venezuelan elections, he faces tough challenges

The largest concentration of Venezuelans in the U.S. resides in South Florida. Most are stridently anti-Chavez and are expected to vote for Capriles. But they must travel to New Orleans to cast their ballots because Chavez closed the Miami consulate in January 2012. Some 20,000 Venezuelans were registered to vote from the Miami consulate.

It is unlikely their numbers will decide the election; last year, Capriles lost by 1.6 million votes; there are 38,000 Venezuelan voters in the U.S.

“You never know,” said Eric Hershberg, director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University. “This is an election under an unusual circumstance. Surprises happen.”

Sollami said Voto Donde Sea had arranged for 32 buses to depart from Miami on Saturday, seven more than during the October presidential election. Raising money was challenging, and the group hasn’t been able to offer as many free tickets as last year.

“It’s very hard,” Sollami said. “It’s a very long and complicated move going inland.”

Most of the buses planned to arrive in New Orleans by early Sunday and head back immediately after the vote. Sollami herself is traveling to Venezuela to vote because she was not able to change her registration site before the Miami consulate closed.

“People are motivated,” she said.

The Miami suburb of Doral — affectionately known as “Doralzuela” because of its large number of Venezuelan residents, restaurants and businesses — also is preparing for Sunday night, when the votes are tallied. Mayor Luigi Boria, who is traveling by plane Sunday to New Orleans and returning to Florida, said Doral expects a large number of people will gather if Capriles is announced as the winner.

Boria donated two buses and two airplane tickets for Venezuelans to travel from Miami to New Orleans. He said he has encouraged others to vote and push their relatives in Venezuela to do the same.

“If we’re traveling 1,500 miles just to exercise our right to vote, we have to tell the people in Venezuela they should do much more,” he said.

The atmosphere was festive in Doral on Saturday as Venezuelans gathered in a public park to board the buses, even as rain poured down in the early afternoon. A crowd of people not traveling to New Orleans waved flags as the buses left, wishing them well.

Francisco and Ella Montanez, ages 80 and 79, said they were going to New Orleans by bus for the future of their country.

“So that our country can return to what it was,” Ella Montez said. “For unity. Without hate. Without bitterness.”

Although in the last days of the very short campaign – officially only ten days — opposition candidate Henrique Capriles narrowed Maduro’s lead to just 9 points, according to some polls, it seems there won’t be enough time for him to gain sufficient support to defeat the Chavista candidate.

The campaign has been a strange and, at times, bizarre event. Maduro has not only invoked Chavez’s name and figure in all his appearances, in commercials, in T-shirts and in anything related to the voting, but he went even further to claim that one recent morning Chavez’s spirit appeared to him through a “little bird” that flew into a small wood church where he was praying. The little bird, said the 50-year-old former union leader, legislator and past Foreign Minister, went around his head three times, whistled and gave him the blessing “to walk to victory.”

In another remarkable moment of the campaign, Maduro asserted in all seriousness that anybody who didn’t vote for him would be “voting against himself, and the curse of the Macarapana will fall on him.” The Macarapana curse is a saying in Venezuelan popular culture that refers to a battle in the XVI century where the Spaniards defeat the indigenous inhabitants. The implication is that to vote for the opposition is to risk extinction.

But because of Maduro’s advantage in most polls and the unsurprising campaign using Chavez’s memory to win election, attention already is shifting to the aftermath of Sunday’s vote. Assuming there is not a monumental miscalculation by all pollsters, soon there will be a new Maduro Administration and the challenges it will confront are tough.

There are questions about Maduro’s ability to deal with an economy in crisis, with annual inflation of near 30 percent, a public deficit of around 11 percent, and with shortages of basic staples and foreign currency–the last, unique in the world for a major oil producing country that daily receives millions of dollars for the petroleum it sells.

The international trend in oil consumption, with countries like the U.S. producing more local sources of energy and buying less from abroad, almost surely will bring down the price of oil, and of course, result in less income for the Venezuelan treasury. A stunning 95 percent of Venezuelan export earnings come from oil (45 percent of government revenues).

Maduro also will have to deal with at least two other matters related directly to oil: the subsidy for gasoline that Venezuelans buy –$12 billion dollars annually or almost 6 percent of GDP — and the cheap oil Venezuela sells to Cuba, Nicaragua and other countries friendly with Chavismo.

It won’t be easy to convince Venezuelans to pay more for gasoline — now around 18 cents a gallon — and the Chavistas, in particular, to accept a reduction in public spending. Both are necessary measures to stop the bleeding of public finances. The last time a Venezuelan government tried to cut the subsidy — in 1989 — there were riots and the military was called out to quell the violence.

In regard to the countries that get oil on favorable terms — not only cheap but also on credit — Cuba is the main recipient because of the Castros’ personal relationship and political alliance with Chavez. Oil is essential to Cuba’s economic well being and under Chavez, there was not much discussion about the deal for almost 100,000 barrels of oil a day. Now Maduro will have to explain to the public why he is continuing the deal in hard times — especially if Venezuelans are asked to pay more.

Maduro will govern a coalition of diverse forces that stayed united thanks largely to Chavez’s strong personality and charisma, as well as the advantages that come with having control of the state apparatus. With Chavez gone, Maduro will have to be careful of moves from all sides. From the right, a military establishment that never was close to him. From the left, various Chavistas social movements that will demand an even more radical socialist government.

The issues with the military won’t be minor for Maduro. It’s true that the Commander of the Armed Forces, Admiral Diego Montero, has given his support to the Chavista candidate, saying that the men in uniform should unite to “assure that Maduro is the next president elect of all Venezuelans.”

At the same time, it is not a secret that the military sees Maduro as too radical or too close to the Cubans, and that its favorite political leader was Diosdado Cabello, an ex military man, also part of the historic Chavistas – one of the few who were with Chavez during the failed coup of state in 1992 — and now the current head of the national assembly.

It remains to be seen if Maduro can relate to the uniformed officers — demand obedience and discipline, and earn their trust — having neither the military background nor the charisma of Chavez. Or if Cabello will play the role of a loyal subordinate to a civilian President Maduro.

Maduro meanwhile will have to make a decision about the role of the military in the new government. There are now many former military officers running state governorships and ministries, both a source of political and economic power. There will be competition among the Chavistas for these positions, and again, Chavez won’t be there to arbitrate and deliver the final word.

Maduro won’t have the money either to continue buying the Russian military hardware that has kept the military happy. And there will be the issue of accusations by the U.S. government against several Venezuelan officers of having links with drug trafficking. Will Maduro be sensitive to any of these accusations to gain international acceptance at the risk of angering the military?

For  opposition candidate Capriles, time is on his side. He just needs a decent result and to keep the opposition together for the next election. He is only 40 years old and  already he will have two presidential campaigns under his belt. He has called Maduro “a liar and incompetent,” and noted that the Chavista candidate “is not Chavez.” He can afford to wait.

Regardless of Maduro’s competence, the reality is that the challenges he will face as president will soon show if being the political heir of Chavez is enough to be a successful leader of a country as polarized and economically hobbled as Venezuela.

Carlos Rajo is Telemundo’s Political Analyst. To read the piece in Spanish or for more visit Telemundo.

Maduro said that he received late president Hugo Chavez’s blessing to run for president through a little bird when he went to chapel to pray. Maduro, speaking from Chavez’s former state home of Barinas, said that the little bird sang to him. When the bird appeared and circled him three times before whistling to him, he said he knew it was the spirit and blessing of the late Venezuelan leader.

RELATED: Maduro sworn in as Venezuela’s acting President, criticizes U.S. and opposition 

“I felt his spirit,” Maduro said in a televised speech broadcast from Barinas. “I felt him there as though he were giving us a blessing, saying to us ‘Today the battle begins.’”

Vice President of the Council of the Americas Eric Farnsworth told Bloomberg that Maduro was trying to ride Chavez’s wave of popularity. He said that Maduro was attempting to “claim the mantle of divinity, of being touched by the departed Chavez.”

Maduro’s comments come as the late Chavez enjoys almost divine status since his death earlier this month. Some chapels in the country have even been inaugurated in his honor.

Maduro was chosen as Hugo Chavez’s successor before he left to Cuba to received treatment for his unspecified form of cancer. The acting president is pitted against opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, a lawyer and former governor.

RELATED: Venezuelan elections: Face off between the showman and the lawyer 

With less than two weeks till the  presidential elections, the campaign has grown heated and personal. Capriles’ campaign lodged a formal protest today, claiming that several high ranking military officials illegally endorsed ruling party candidate Nicolas Maduro. Maduro’s campaign has denied violating any law.

While Tuesday marked the official start of the campaign, both candidates began to make appearances and deliver speeches just days after Chavez’s death on March 5th. The presidential election will be held on April 14th.

Foreign Minister Elias Jaua said Wednesday that “any type of contact has been postponed” with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson, who had reportedly reached out to Venezuela’s government before Chavez’s death.

Jaua specified, however, that diplomatic and consular relations would remain between the two countries.

Venezuela’s government expelled two military attaches earlier this month for allegedly talking to members of the country’s armed forces. Washington responded by ejecting two Venezuelan diplomats, who were honored by Jaua Wednesday.

“This guy’s name is Tom Perez and he may as well be Hugo Chavez, and that is not an exaggeration,” Limbaugh began, saying Perez was “the guy in the Department of Justice in the civil rights division who made the call not to prosecute the New Black Panthers.”

Limbaugh said listeners should imagine George W. Bush nominating someone who didn’t prosecute the Ku Klux Klan when they engaged in voter intimidation. “And then after not prosecuting klanners for that, then imagine what would happen if Bush turned around and nominated the Grand Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan to a cabinet position where he would be deciding on discrimination lawsuits,” he said. “There would be unmitigated hell to pay – if George W. Bush put a klansman in his cabinet there would be hell to pay, that’s essentially what’s happened here.”

RELATED: Obama calls Perez an “advocate” for working families

High-profile Republicans rebuked Limbaugh for his remarks.

“I don’t know why anyone pays attention to rush Limbaugh or pays him any mind,” said Republican strategist Danny Vargas, who served as co-chair for Mitt Romney’s Hispanic outreach “Juntos con Romney” in Virginia. “He’s in the business of inflammatory remarks. Those of us trying to focus on moving the country forward don’t pay attention to rush Limbaugh and his ilk.”

Former Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Michael Steele, who worked with Perez in Maryland when he served as lieutenant governor and Perez was a member of the Montgomery County Council, also chided Limbaugh.

“I think we just need to be a little more tempered here,” Steele said, according to the Huffington Post. “I just don’t see a basis for, you know, Chavez? How did we jump to that? Oh, because he’s Hispanic? Oh, got it, got it, alright. Again, you can’t take that seriously, and that’s what the American people are tired of, quite frankly.”

Steele praised Perez, saying he would be a good labor secretary, and Vargas echoed those sentiments.

“Am I 100 percent in agreement with everything Thomas Perez has done? No, but he’s a qualified individual who the president nominated,” he said.

Vargas lumped Limbaugh together with another conservative talker who is often on the wrong end of controversy.

“To the extent anyone is paying attention to Limbaugh or Ann Coulter, they’re in it for ratings and to be as inflammatory as possible,” he said.

Limbaugh’s comments come at a time when the Republican party is trying to re-brand itself and transition away from a reputation among voters as the party of “stuffy old  men” that is “out of touch,” as a report by the RNC looking into why Republicans lost the election, said. Marco Rubio has been trying to communicate GOP ideals in a broader way and has been a high-profile part of efforts to enact bipartisan immigration reform, while Rand Paul on Tuesday announced that he supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

“There are lots of us who are more thoughtful and serious minded on both sides trying to find ways to move the country forward,” Vargas says.

“That’s where the focus ought to be.”

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Emotions were high in Buenos Aires as crowds gathered to celebrate the newly elected pope, Pope Francis. Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez Kirchner said she hopes the newly elected pope will fight to reunite humanity in the struggle for justice and equality. In Venezuela, hundreds paid their final respects to Hugo Chavez on the last day of official mourning. Government officials say his remains will not be embalmed as originally planned. Also, a Brazilian doctor faces fraud charges after using silicone fingers to sign in for a number of absent co-workers. Police say the doctor had six prosthetic fingers that fooled the employee attendance device in a Sao Paolo hospital. And scientists prepared for the inauguration of the world’s most powerful observatory in Chile. The telescope will probe deeper into space than any other telescope in the world.

The controversy follows a widely published photo showing Ahmadinejad embracing Chavez’s mother at the funeral of the late Venezuelan president.

Iranian papers on Tuesday cited clerics from the religious center of Qom who described the contact as “forbidden” and inappropriate behavior and “clowning around.”

Iran’s strict Islamic codes prohibit physical contact between unrelated members of the opposite sex.

The conservative clerics also condemned Ahmadinejad’s condolence letter to Venezuelans in which he called Chavez a “martyr” who will be resurrected and who will return to Earth along with Jesus Christ and Imam Mahdi, a 9th century saint revered by Shiite Muslims.

Two Venezuelan diplomats were expelled from the United States today. The move is in response to Venezuela’s expulsion of two American military officials last week. Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles announced that he will run for president. Capriles is accusing Acting President Nicolas Maduro of manipulating Hugo Chavez’s death to benefit his campaign. Fourteen people are dead and dozens are hurt after a bus plunged off a cliff in Peru. According to one of the survivors, the brakes failed causing the driver to lose control. And Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto celebrated 100 days in office. He said that he will continue to reform government and will focus on bringing peace to Mexico.