Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro will take the oath as Acting President of the country on March 8th.
Maduro will temporarily execute the duties of the head of state for a month. Afterwards, the country will hold presidential elections. Nicolas Maduro, the successor to Hugo Chavez, is one of the major presidential candidates.
Chavez, having won the presidential election in October last year, appointed 50-year-old Nicolas Maduro as the Vice-President. During his trip to Cuba in December 2012, Chavez publicly stated that the vice president should be his successor.
The body of Hugo Chavez will be embalmed and placed in the Museum of the Revolution, so that the people could see him forever, Nicolás Maduro said.
"Chavez will be embalmed just like Russian leader Vladimir Lenin, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and the head of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong," he added.
The people of Venezuela will continue to bid farewell to their adored leader for at least seven more days, as the number of those willing to bid farewell to Comandante counts millions of people.
The state funeral ceremony for Hugo Chavez will be held on Friday, March 8, at 11:00 local time (19:30 MSK), said Nicolas Maduro. Fifty-five high-level delegations will come to Venezuela to take part in the ceremony.
Afterwards, the president's body will be brought to the Mountain Barracks in Caracas, where on February 4, 1992, Hugo Chavez was commanding the military coup. The building housed the Military History Museum at that time, which Chavez wanted to turn into the Museum of the Revolution, but did not have time to do that, Maduro said.