VII. The arrival of full democracy   

1958 is a crucial year in Venezuelan contemporary history. Larrazabal was a fluke. He had no more legitimacy than Perez Jimenez and no sooner the new government was installed, committed to democratic elections before the end of the year, than the question of who really had overthrown Perez Jimenez, the military uprising or the Caracas masses, became a disquieting issue. The original rebellious officers felt that they were entitled to rule and started brewing their own conspiracies. But Larrazabal was generally accepted as the leader of the armed forces. Most importantly, the political parties, which were busily rebuilding their national organizations, gave him their total support, including the few but vociferous communists. As before, it was Betancourt who proved the master organizer through his revived AD party. Another source of support for Larrazabal was that he decreed demagogic measures to conciliate the discontented masses. These measures were being adlibbed and one in particular, the most influential, was completely irrational. A so-called Emergency Plan was put into place which consisted in hand-outs to those who could claim they were unemployed. These popular subsidies were far above what the average Venezuelan earned in the rural areas and there followed inevitably a flood of migrants to Caracas, a city that before had few shantytowns, and settled and built shacks on the hillsides on the eastern and western edges of the valley in which Caracas nestles. The population of the city soon doubled with these rural, barely educated newcomers, who were obviously strongly pro-Larrazabal but were also a potential source of political de-stabilization. The pardos in effect became a force to be reckoned with in the forthcoming elections. But before these took place many things were occurring. The officers who felt they had been cheated staged various insurrections, even to an “invasion” by one of them from Colombia who managed to take over San Cristobal, the capital of Táchira state. All these conspiracies were contained although some required drastic means and at one point the Larrazabal government was in real danger of being toppled. The armed forces were instrumental in quelling the revolts, but each time there was one, Caracas mobs went wild prodded by the politicians.

            The most menacing of these popular riots was provoked by the visit to Venezuela of vice-president Richard Nixon and his wife Patricia. He represented the Eisenhower administration, which had conferred on Perez Jimenez the Medal of Honor for his crucial role in sanctioning the imperialist American overthrow of Arbenz. The Venezuelan government had not anticipated the raging public reaction to this emissary from Washington, possibly because it thought that it had assuaged public indignation by allowing the hysterical daily denigration of the former dictator. Venezuelans were not that versed in foreign affairs, but the communists were and it was at their instigation that crowds assaulted Nixon’s motorcade along an avenue that ran close to where many shantytowns had grown, ironically not far from a huge apartment complex that Perez Jimenez had built for workers. Before the Venezuelan army intervened—preventing a ready-to-go Marines intervention—Nixon’s car had been rocked back and forth, its windows had been smashed, and the vice-president and his wife had been thoroughly drenched in spit. As would be expected, once safe in the American embassy residence, Nixon let loose with imprecations and he returned quickly to the USA. It is to his credit that when he reported on his trip, which was meant as a fact-finding and conciliatory gesture to Latin America, he stressed that his country was partly to blame for the unfriendly reception in Caracas.

            As the elections approached, the parties initiated talks to form an united political front in defence of democracy, which implied, if not a single candidate chosen among them, at least an understanding for future cooperation in ruling Venezuela democratically. The really significant pact that emerged during 1958 was the unspoken one by which, mainly Betancourt, agreed not to mess with the military in any way and let them run their own house. The military in their turn pledged that they were not to allow politicization within their ranks to the extend that they renounced to even the right to vote, which was made compulsory for the rest of Venezuelans. The foxy Betancourt, who sometimes is referred to as the “father of Venezuelan democracy” (much less in recent times than before), insisted that the communists were not to be included in the political talks, and excluded they were but took it very calmly. The chances of one candidate were slim and nothing came out of the negotiations except a well-meaning understanding that the parties would stick together in the defence of democracy from whatever threats might arise in the future. This meant that the electoral process was on and each party was on its own.

            AD knew that it was still the most popular party all over Venezuela and Betancourt was its choice for candidate. Caldera had no rivals in COPEI, the party he founded, and he entered the political fray counting on the conservative middle class. But Villalba and his URD party adopted an opportunistic strategy, which was practically an admission that they could not compete with the AD national pardo popular base. It was the pardo masses in Caracas that Villalba was targeting when, instead of postulating himself, he chose Larrazabal, who also had the communist with him, to be the URD candidate. Larrazabal turned over the provisional presidency to a civilian and he went on campaign. When the results were in, Betancourt was elected for the term that ended in 1964, but this time by a plurality and not the absolute majorities that AD had gotten in 1946 and 1947. Caracas was no longer an AD redoubt. The city from then on became an electoral maverick that could swing in any unforeseen direction and this time it went all out for Larrazabal, who came in second. Caldera did not do badly in third place and received proportionally more votes than he had in 1947. But the Venezuelan panorama was cloudy at best. Part of the 1958 demagoguery was that the UCV (Central University of Venezuela), which likes to style itself “casa primada” (first house of Venezuelan learning), was granted “autonomy”, which meant that the police were barred from the University City; and starting in 1960 it became a bastion of an insurrection that leftists started to recoup the chance they thought they had missed when Caracas was so politicized that they could get crowds in the streets by snapping their fingers, although Larrazabal’s showing with mainly URD votes should have taught them that they weren’t as popular as they thought, that they were not popular at all, to put it bluntly. Under its autonomy status, the UCV gave sanctuary to every leftist movement and its rectors were complicit with the communists or themselves Marxists. It got so bad that Caldera, when he finally got his shot at being president, was forced to close it for a year. But, as things in Venezuela have a way of taking surprising turns, when Chavez began to “revolutionize” Venezuela, the UCV was collectively, though mildly, opposing his regime.

            Betancourt inaugurated his presidency as a moderate, except on the issue of dictatorships, for which he applied the idealistic foreign policy that Venezuela would not recognize dictatorial government anywhere, particularly in Latin America, but including the USSR, which was an USA pleaser. The “Betancourt doctrine” was un-realistic, for Venezuelan democratization occurred in the midst of a marked tendency in the rest of Latin America towards authoritarianism. He was also un-realistic in reviving Venezuela’s claim on British Guiana to the Essequibo river and he had all maps of Venezuela show this large territory as part of the country albeit as disputed. The British allowed free elections in their dependency in 1961, but when a Marxist, Cheddi Jagan, won them, it annulled the results and after three years permitted new ones which were won by a man, Forbes Burnham, who turned out to be as leftist, or more, as Jagan, and a monumental bungler to boot. The point is that when British Guiana became independent Guyana in 1966, the Venezuelan claim became an undecipherable legal tangle, but Venezuelan maps to this day still look as Betancourt had them drawn. That the Venezuelan claim was bogus populism had its most perplexing demonstration when the Guyanese allowed the mad Messiah from California, Jim Jones, to establish a religious community right next to the Venezuelan border in 1977. The Venezuelan minister of foreign affairs at the time, Simon Alberto Consalvi, only found about the Guyanese sleight-of-hand when a California representative went to Jonestown to investigate complaints from constituents about missing relatives. When the congressman got there in November 1978, the suicidal followers of Jones, many of them blacks, first shot him dead and then 917 of them, including 276 children, committed suicide with cyanide-laced Kool Aid. Jones too killed himself.

            In other things, Betancourt was very realistic. He respected the virtual autonomy of the armed forces and he did all he could to keep on the good side of Washington. Betancourt was a great hater, and he held two particular grudges: Perez Jimenez, for obvious reasons, and Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the Dominican dictator against whom in his youth, with Jose Figueres of Costa Rica, he carried on an active subversive opposition, although it really was none of his business. The first of these targets of his ire led him to undercut developmental projects which would have been beneficial to his country. His hatred for Trujillo almost cost him his life, although in the end it was Trujillo who lost his. Perez Jimenez had left in place the basic plans and projects for the further modernization and for the heavy industrialization of Venezuela. Guayana had large iron deposits. The infrastructure for exploiting them was laid as well as the complementary huge steelworks. Communications had been a priority and Venezuela was endowed with a network of roads and bridges that covered the territory where over 90% of the population lived. Half or more of these were improved surface and all they lacked was the asphalt paving. This system linked with the many blacktops that the oil companies had built in eastern and western Venezuela. These had been traced for exploration and exploitation, but they also served for the use of the general population and were now linked to the national highway system. Perez Jimenez had built motorways from Caracas to Valencia and from Caracas to the port at La Guaira. By 1955, you could drive from one end to the other of Venezuela in a matter of days—one day if you didn’t mind not sleeping—where before it would have taken weeks, months if the rainy season hampered travel. In addition, Perez Jimenez had begun the construction of a coherent railway system, although he had not had time to go further than the railroad from Puerto Cabello to Barquisimeto. Perez Jimenez had also created government subsidiaries, called “institutos autónomos” (autonomous institutes)—the “autonomous” was supposed to mean non-political, but its real function was to allow them to negotiated foreign loans—that were to build waterworks and electric power plants in all important urban centers. To this end he had started the construction the huge Caroni river dam which in time was to provide the entire country with a reliable electric grill. Betancourt’s government adopted the plans and the administrative system for carrying them out that the dictatorship had left in place.

            But the politics of repudiation had to have its pound of flesh and Betancourt and his cabinet also cancelled some crucial public works merely because they were initiatives taken by Perez Jimenez. The railroads were scrapped with the argument that Venezuela did not need them having so much asphalt it could expand the road network at a lower cost. Perez Jimenez had built a large reservoir in the central llanos with the irrigation potential to make Venezuela an exporter of rice. The adecos in power built instead a small hydroelectric dam for Caracas upstream and effectively starved the rice-producing scheme which was only realized to a fraction of its planned area. In time most of the land that would have been irrigated was converted into cattle ranches, the traditional but at that point inessential llanos economic activity. In addition to the government–financed development projects, Perez Jimenez was not averse to protectionism and incentives to local industries, but the Betancourt government made a fetish of import-substitution and instead of allowing the free importation of industrial goods for which Venezuela did not have the training, it tried to force foreign suppliers to build plants in the country basically for the assembly or packaging of finished products that were allowed tariff-free into the country. The automobile “industry” was the import-substitution model. Venezuela still does not manufacture car engines and all that the Betancourt and successive governments achieved was to assemble cars, which did give some Venezuelans employment—some parts suppliers, like makers of windshields, also prospered—but made the cars more costly than if they had been imported entire from Detroit to fill Venezuela’s car-mania. But economic nostrums and interventionism went beyond that. The government had opted for “guided planning” and what this meant was that business was strictly regulated through a system of controls that went to from the permission to start one to limits on where and on how it should operate. The author of this “developmental strategy” was Jose Antonio Mayobre, a former communist and Betancourt’s economic guru. All of this required more government employees and again, as after 1945, the Venezuelan bureaucracy bloomed, as it would go on doing with each new president until it reached a paroxysm under Carlos Andres Perez, Betancourt’s personal secretary and future president. Another trusted Betancourt minister was Leopoldo Sucre Figarella, who considered that a long bridge to complete the Caracas-Valencia motorway was unnecessarily expensive and he had the six-lane highway constructed along the mountain contour, but the ground beneath was not firm and this section of the motorway started sliding and during the following decades the cost of shoring it up was at least ten times what the bridge would have cost.

            But the real pound of flesh that Betancourt got was much more than a pound, more like the entire weight of Perez Jimenez. The ex-dictator had gone from the Dominican Republic to Miami, which is heaven for Venezuelans, but Betancourt had him accused of filching in the state treasury, which was true (although the evidence was circumstantial), and the Venezuelan supreme court convicted him. Venezuela asked the John F. Kennedy administration for his extradition and to every one’s surprise the USA complied betraying an unconditional ally it once medaled. That same year Kennedy did another betrayal with the approval for the military coup d’état in South Vietnam in which another American ally, Ngo Dinh Diem, was assassinated. Perez Jimenez was first held in the Miami county jail and was finally sent to Venezuela to finish the term in a comfortable prison. In all he spent five years in calaboose.

            The weirdest of all import-substitution plans had to do with milk. The tropics are suited for extensive cattle farming, which is rather clever as, during the dry season, it lets cattle roam immense, unfenced areas with a ratio of some ten hectares per head of beef, and when the rains come the cattle, without any herding, head on their own to the higher pastures, where they feed while the lower, flooded areas grow new grass. Since the late 19th century, there was a British cattle-raising company which held about one fourth of the Venezuelan state of Apure—that would be some 15,000 square kilometers [figures have to be checked here, but they are approximately correct]—which with the system described provided Britain with much of the beef it consumed. The company always kept a very low profile in Venezuela and those who knew of its existence called it la Lancaster, although it was always owned by the Liverpool Vestey family. There were reports that the Chavez government had it expropriated, at least part of it, in 2006 because it was mostly idle land, but it really wasn’t because you do need a lot of acreage to raise cattle in the tropics, especially in the Venezuelan lowlands, whose natural pasturages are not very nutritious and the soil cannot sustain good grass. Be that as it may, cows in Venezuela, even in cool Andes regions, only produce between four and six liters of milk a day, which, considering the size of a cow and the time it spends chewing the cud, is low indeed. But Venezuela wanted to be self-sustaining in milk. This project was a Perez Jimenez heritage, for it was his government that cut a road through the thick jungles of southern Zulia state and encouraged dairying where it was futile. In other words, to be able to nurture underperforming cows, Venezuela had gone to a lot of expense and deliberately destroyed thousands of square miles of primeval jungle. Whether that jungle would have been good for anything other than making insects and ecologists happy, I cannot say, but what followed upon its destruction was moronic enough to make any sensible head shake in disbelief.

            The cows themselves, which cost a mint, were not slackers. In other latitudes they yielded milk for pasteurization, pulverization, and cheese-making for domestic markets with as much or more left over for exports. But when transplanted to sweltering lowlands denuded of jungle, though not of insects and parasites, they became sickly and sad and, mooing for Denmark or Switzerland, their udders dried up. As to make them truly contented would have required unimaginable investments in air-conditioning, it was thought that what they needed were the genetic strains of hardy tropical bulls among which the most renowned were the Brahma bulls of Asia, which meant spending another mint in another cattle-import program. Cross-breeding was carried out, which the cows liked, but the end results were still the measly four to six liters a day, the latter figure making cattlemen exude satisfaction. Their satisfaction had nothing to do with their cows performance, which they weren't dumb enough to believe was really anything to brag about, but for other reasons. By the time the jungles had been fell, deficient infrastructure had been built, bad quality pastures had been sown and wilted, cattle had been imported and crossbred, each liter of thinnish milk laboriously extracted from each squalid cow cost as much as a brick of gold. But the worst was that the producers claimed they could not make ends meet and rather than let them fend for themselves, the Venezuelan state opted for generous subsidies as if the uneconomical production of milk was the primary goal of economic development. Thus, the system for extracting watery milk from miserable cows for sale at exorbitant prices no one could pay, permanently substituted the previous natural order, and the beneficiaries of this brilliant scheme became multi-millionaire clients of the state. If they had returned in taxes part of what they were getting in subsidies, it would have been an absurd recycling system for making some people rich and creating badly remunerated jobs, filled by Colombians anyway, in lands which had no inhabitants to start with. But they weren't returning anything much and basically the state was giving away money.

            Not content with having discovered an outlandish apparatus worthy of Rube Goldberg—a famous American inventor who patented the remote-control back-scratcher—the state then encouraged these enterprising, self-reliant dairy farmers to band together and invest in plants for making powdered milk, which they presumably could afford from all the free money they were getting, but this resulted in an outcry for more and greater subsidies. Since these would have bankrupted the state, the milk-producing powder-milk industrialists were allowed to import huge amounts of duty-free powdered milk, which was precisely what the state had wanted to avoid in the first place with its milk subsidies. When Castro got started, especially during his frog-legs period—an idea some one (later executed) sold him for flooding the French market—it was obvious to hopeful, well-meaning people that, however badly he performed, he could never do anything as botched as third-world Venezuelan capitalism. The “milk plan”, as what I have described was called, reached its climax in the first government of Carlos Andres Perez, when cronies, like the Finol family, became inordinately rich, and it was Perez himself who in his second presidency finally put down the Mandrake-the-magician, out-of-any-believable-world scheme. Of course, there’s always a reason for everything and if the milk plan might have looked crazy to any person who could add two and two, it made a lot of sense to the Finols and the Camachos, another family outfit that could afford King Airs through it, although it should be said that the Finols had a Falcon, which as a private plane—executive jets, they are usually called—beats a King Air many times over.

            All of the economic policies of the Betancourt government were underwritten by the Kennedy administration through the Alliance for Progress which used Venezuela as the exemplar for all of Latin America. The ideology behind this was a package called “development economics” expressed in a work by the economist W.W. Rostow, who described economic progress with the “take-off metaphor”: a developing economy was like an airplane which got its motors running, taxied to the head of the runway, then sped along  until it took off, which was the historical moment of self-sustaining growth. There were many other ideas of this sort. Another was the “trickle down effect”, which expected that, as an economy developed, its lower social strata would benefit from the achievements of free enterprise. But in Venezuela free enterprise was a very relative concept because of the proliferation of government regulations, not that Betancourt had anything like a “command economy” in mind, for the rights of private property were never meddled with. The trickle down effect took the form of political clientelism through which state hand-outs and local state-created posts, some purely nominal, were financed at the lower pardo levels. This was the rule in the Caracas shantytowns, but also in the rural and semi-rural areas where adeco loyalties were firm. The Betancourt government expanded educational facilities of all sorts on a large scale. New universities were created. Vocational and crafts schools were founded. Perez Jimenez’s immigration policy was halted. Paradoxically, Venezuelans were not doing basic jobs, such as plumbing and carpentry, and a new and larger wave of immigration swept over the country mainly from Colombia, much of it illegal. Venezuela became for its neighbor what the USA was for México. There was no pardo discrimination—as such this had never existed in Venezuela—but when it came to upper echelon positions in and out of the government, Venezuelan whites and foreigners were generally preferred to the average Venezuelan even with sufficient qualifications. With Betancourt, Venezuela started becoming a nation of social parasites. But Venezuelans themselves had no trouble with that.

            I have lingered over these issues because, as this is the way Venezuelan democracy generally functioned, I do not want to make this outline repetitive. But the biggest problems that Betancourt in power faced was merely surviving, even in a personal sense. The underlying cause of the instability was that the 1958 elections had settled the issue of who had the right to govern democratically, but this was not as many disgruntled officers saw it, because they still felt very strongly that it was the armed forces and not the “people” who had overthrown Perez Jimenez. This created an indescribable mélange of partisans of Perez Jimenez, rightists who were calling Betancourt a communist in disguise, and new insubordinate officers who were clamoring a “real revolution”. During his first year in power Betancourt was the object of an assassination attempt through a control-remote car bomb. He suffered minor lesions. The Dominican dictator Trujillo, who himself was assassinated by his own disaffected officers in 1961, was blamed, but the actual perpetrators were Venezuelans. Then, military insurrections in Carúpano and in Puerto Cabello, which were supposed to take place conjointly in 1962, instead followed upon each other. The military held their part of the 1958 agreement with Betancourt and suppressed them. But the strangest of all the movements against Betancourt, and the least effectual—although Carúpano and Puerto Cabello can only be described as aberrations—came from the communist left. Fidel Castro occupied Havana in January 1959. He was considered a reformist compared with the unscrupulous mulatto dictator Fulgencio Batista, a man who as a sergeant had carried out his first coup in Cuba back in 1936. The first sign that Castro was different from all the caudillos that Latin America had ever had, was that he ordered the public execution of over a hundred Batista army men and policemen, although he himself had benefited by a pardon from Batista when he had tried to take over a military barracks in 1953. Once in power, Castro never concealed his anti-Americanism and in 1961 he claimed that he was and had always been a Marxist-Leninist. Venezuelan leftists, and especially the communists, were watching, and they came to the unreasonable conclusion, not entirely unlike that of the rightist officers who had plotted against Betancourt, that the 1957 “revolution” had been hijacked at its most popular and effervescent and that they were going to attempt a repeat of Castro’s real revolution. Urban guerrillas were formed even as in Congress leftists were clamoring against Betancourt. The subversive cells carried out some sensational acts, one being the daylight robbery of an exhibition of Impressionist painters sponsored by France at the Venezuelan art museum. In another more deadly action they shot and killed eight Venezuelan soldiers in the back to steal their weapons. Betancourt put his aide Perez in charge of repression. The leftist deputies were arrested. The urban insurrection was brought under control, but the communists and their leftist allies took to the hills with the intention of repeating the pattern of Castro’s rural guerrillas. Betancourt wanted to back the American proposal at an OAS conference in Costa Rica to expel Cuba from that body, which was achieved, but his own foreign minister, Ignacio Luis Arcaya, an offshoot of the family who had profited handsomely from Gomez’s concessions, refused to obey. One person who took seriously the Venezuelan leftists was a British journalist, John Gott, who wrote them up as if they were potential Castros and today is having a field day with Chavez’s “revolution”. Gott knew, and knows, about Venezuela as much as I know about making lava bread.

            In the elections of 1963, the adeco Raul Leoni, a long-time ally of Betancourt from the times of Gomez, won handily. Caldera came in second. The Larrazabal political phenomenon was eclipsed and Villalba on his own did poorly. AD was still the pardo party par excellence, but Caracas was definitely lost. Leoni’s government was unexceptional, but it was Leoni who had to liquidate the communist insurrection, for which he put the army in charge of the country with carte blanche to be as ruthless as it had to. But in fact it was the communist guerrilleros themselves who brought about their own liquidation. They had no rural support whatsoever. Unlike guerrillas all over the world, they did not control villages and lived from hand to mouth. They knew they were no match for the army and avoided confrontations. Castro had been hoping that Venezuela would be the second act of the Latin American revolution and he tried to supply the Venezuelan guerrillas. This was in keeping with the theory of what could be called the “permanent agrarian revolution”, which the French intellectual Regis Debray had expressed in the widely circulated book Revolution inside the revolution?, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara had been trying to carry out first in Africa and later, fatally for him, in Bolivia. Castro sent a trusted officer, Manuel Ochoa, to assess the Venezuelan guerrillas and the report that he brought was thumbs down, which effectively ended Cuba’s intromission in Venezuelan affairs. By then the Venezuelan leftists had given up on violence and were seeking legalization, but Leoni did not offer it. Ochoa was later tried and executed by Castro on an unlikely charge of drug-smuggling.

            The elections of 1968 proved conclusively that Venezuela had an indisputably working democracy. But there are a few caveats. During the Betancourt presidency AD had produced a radical offshoot led by Domingo Alberto Rangel, but as it was illegalized it could not participate in the 1963 elections. AD had a core of pardo leaders and still another offshoot was led by one of these, but they were clobbered in the same elections. The rural clientelist system was definitely working. But during 1968, according to the Buggins turn rule that the party applied, a referendum was held in which the two rival adecos were Luis Beltran Prieto Figueroa, the living symbol of the party’s inter-racial credentials, and Gonzalo Barrios, a tubby politician who was the leading light in the so-called “Parisian circle” within the party and whose turn it definitely wasn’t. As the referendum was an internal party affair the true results are not really known. It is as likely that Prieto Figueroa won as that he didn’t, but the party hierarchy claimed that Barrios had and Barrios became the official candidate. Pietro Figueroa, whose nickname was the “Black One”, was very miffed and he formed his own party whose secretary general was another pardo, Jesus Angel Paz Galarraga. Caldera was anything if not obstinate and he had been the losing Social Christian COPEI candidate in the elections of 1947, 1958, and 1963. This time Caldera’s perseverance paid off and he won against runner up Barrios by the slim margin of 30,000. In another Latin American country this would have provoked turbulence, as even in America Bush’s electoral margin in 1999 did in a legal sense, but not in Venezuela. Caldera thus became president by the skin of his teeth. Prieto Figueroa came in third, but amazingly a party that had been formed by nostalgic perezjimenistas and had no organization whatever obtained around one fourth of the vote for Congress, and this was happening in less than ten years since the dictator’s overthrow.

            Democracy functioned but it was definitely not fulfilling everybody’s expectations. Perez Jimenez himself was elected to a seat in the Senate, but when he returned in the belief that Venezuela had to be respectful of election results, the adecos had already had their complaisant judges issue orders of arrest on one pretext or another and at the airport Perez Jimenez was mobbed by adeco thugs and he fled Venezuela looking very scared never to return from his Madrid mansion. This was a clear demonstration that elections in Venezuela had to be won by the right people or else. And not only that: the democratic Venezuelan government wasn’t even respectful of Venezuelan civil liberties as was shown when Caldera had a small but highly disrespectful magazine called Reventon shut down by the military with the unlikely charge that it had insulted the armed forces by saying that some soldiers were gay (statistically inevitable). In his political past, Caldera had been pro-business, but in his incarnation as president he increased government intervention in the economy. He was hamstrung by Congress, which was controlled by the adecos, so bureaucracy was kept at the same level it had been, but the new government applied unabashedly the “to the victors belong the spoils” practice. Agrarian reform had been dead letter from before. The leftist parties, of which now there were many more than in 1958, were legalized. Towards the end of his government, oil prices increased sensationally but fiscal revenues came into the state’s coffers too late for Caldera to use them to shape up his party’s muscles. There was also an eye-popping building boom in Caracas but suspiciously the new constructions were going up but not into the market.

            The reason for this situation was that polls, which in Venezuela usually are very accurate, had been showing that the adecos and their presidential candidate, Betancourt’s enforcer, Carlos Andres Perez, were going to win the elections and a spike was sure to occur in the economy, which had been stagnating not so much because of anything that Caldera had done as because AD blocked him and government spending had not increased as much as he would have liked. Many people, among them this author, were skeptical that Venezuelans would choose such a controversial figure, but when the results were in they showed Perez had won a clear a victory, but, what was even more important, AD had an absolute majority in Congress: the pardo masses were still adecos to the core (1973). Perez’s appeal was not only to the unwashed but also to the elite and the middle class, for he had been scrubbed and tailored by his close adviser Diego Arria, a Caracas dandy who, when appointed mayor of Caracas, tried to but couldn’t do an efficient job and ended up a big millionaire. After a stint as Venezuelan ambassador to the UN (under Perez’s second presidency), he retired in the Big Apple. Perez was given a mandate by Congress to rule by decree for 100 days and then 100 days more. He also had a fiscal fortune in his hands such as no Venezuelan president ever had. And Perez didn’t lose time to start spending it.

            He commissioned a report on government which was prepared and carried out by Arnoldo Gabaldon. It contained a blueprint for bureaucratic expansion as few times have been seen in history anywhere, except perhaps during the early years of Bolshevism in the newly created USSR. Gabaldon himself was named to a super-ministry which combined public works and communications. As it was impossible to hire every Venezuelan, Perez decreed that all public places should have bathroom attendants and that every elevator the country over should have an operator, although Venezuela had only had one or two hand-operated elevators before the Perez Jimenez building euphoria. Contracts were handed out with abandon and Venezuelan’s applauded with gusto. Perez proclaimed that the oil wealth would not be squandered and founded a huge fund for “productive investments”. This fund was exhausted very quickly. Congress had surrendered its power of fiscal oversight, one of the historical bases of democracy. Corruption went up incalculably and there was even a case in which Venezuela bought a meat-freezing ship—it had been named the Sierra Nevada (snowy mountains), and the commissioner’s fee here was well known as well as its recipient, who was never even tried— which was anchored to store part of the immense quantity of imports that were being handled. Ferries were bought in Scandinavia for routes between Venezuelan and the offshore Dutch free ports. Their windows could not be opened and they were not equipped for the Venezuelan heat. Waiting to dock in any Venezuelan port on any given day, one could see dozens of ships queuing to unload, which meant that demurrage charges were huge and were obviously passed on to consumers. But consumerism was the whole point to it all. The bolivar, Venezuela’s currency, was so over-valued that almost anybody in Venezuela with a minimum of initiative could go to Miami and bring a suitcase load of goods which were sold to customers, usually friends or neighbors. Even servant quarters were in the net of this informal import economy. In Miami, Venezuelans became known as “gimme two” (of anything, at any price).

            The only area in which Perez showed scruples against rampant consumerism was in the TV industry, in which, for some unfathomable reason—possibly pressure from retailers with large inventories of black-and-white sets—he refused to allow color TV sets until far into his administration, although you could buy them in the free-port island of Margarita and could see color TV in Caracas, where color broadcasts had been going on from before He also delayed the construction of the Caracas metropolitan underground, presumably because it had been initiated by Caldera. Crime in the streets was another by-product of the Venezuelan oil economy, although this could only partially be blamed on the new riches—obviously, with so much spending going on, thugs had easy marks any where—but mainly on the thousands of guns that had been put into circulation during the leftist insurgency which Perez battled. But the government did nothing effective to address the problem, which still plagues Venezuela. Perez simply ignored it, as have all governments since including that of Chavez.

            The vulgarity and rot of Venezuela is difficult to describe in terms that would seem comprehensible, although foreign academics went on talking about Venezuelan society as if it was normal and not in the grasp of a collective frenzy. Yet Perez credentials as a nationalist leader were not soiled, in fact for many they were enhanced, because in 1975 he nationalized the iron industry and in 1976 he jumped further and nationalized the oil industry. As by that time Venezuela was equipped to manage it, not much harm was done by that in itself, but with all the new collaterals that the government could offer Perez, after having gone through the “surplus” for investments, started taking out international loans, and not small ones but sizable ones. Perez “statized” the Venezuelan economy to such a degree that the paper load to open a business was so heavy that a service branch was created called “permisologia” (approximately, the “science” of permits), to which businessmen had to recur as a matter of course if they wanted to get the necessary bureaucratic approval. Permisologia was not meant to deter foreigners and it was more burdensome on Venezuelan small entrepreneurs than on any other economic sector. Leftists were in a dazzled quandary, because, on one hand, they hated Perez’s guts, but, on the other, they couldn’t complain about the state’s interference as that was part of their own social and economic agenda. Labor unions, which in Venezuela were corrupt and pervasive and AD-managed, stood solidly behind Perez.

            One thing that can be credited to Perez is that he introduced legislation to protect the environment, whereas Caldera had tried to build a road into the vast southern area of Venezuela known as Amazonas which his government wanted to settle and exploit. As soils there are barren, all that could have been achieved would have been the destruction of forested areas where only Amerindian tribes and missionaries, both Catholic and Baptist, lived. During his all-out anti-imperialist phase (still going on), Chavez expelled the Protestants, who called themselves New Missions, because he considered them CIA spies. By the time that Perez was through with Venezuela, it was palpable that its society was more unequal than it ever had been: the pardos had been done in again, and as to economic diversification, there was essentially none. Even import-substitution in the automobile industry went down the drain when Perez started importing Dodge Darts and selling them at subsidized prices. [Even the author bought one.] You might be wondering how Perez got another chance to rule Venezuela and the story that follows will explain it. Chavez, incidentally, entered the military academy in 1975, because, as the story he tells goes, he wanted to join the armed forces baseball team and from there jump to the majors. Apparently, his pitching arm was not good enough.

            When the next elections came around in 1979—in Venezuela, presidents and congress were elected in the same election for five-year terms—AD fielded the unexciting Luis Piñerua Ordaz and the Social Christians selected Luis Herrera Campins. The latter, who is probably pardo, did not have anything new to offer except rhetoric, but  in the campaign he was like a charging boar. It really didn’t matter what he said, because the adecos were in a no-win situation disillusioned as they were with Perez and unignited by Piñerua, and Herrera defeated his adeco adversary although not by a large majority. Venezuela had demonstrated once again that at the ballot level it was a working democracy. Few presidents had practiced winner-takes-all as Herrera Campins did. Even full-blooded Social Christians who had worked for the Perez administration—and which Venezuelan wouldn’t have with such a dispensive government?—were fired. But Herrera did have in his cabinet a few figures that were not copeyanos, among them Manuel Quijada. For the Venezuelan Central Bank he named the economist Leopoldo Diaz Bruzual, known as The Goat. Diaz Bruzual was a protégé of  and advisor to Reinaldo Cervini, a very rich man who had life-time tenure at Pro-Venezuela, a kind of semi-official institute founded to promote Venezuelan industrialization. Cervini doubled as Maecenas to communist intellectuals, who would physically confront any one who dared criticize their patron. Herrera Campins toned down the showiness of his predecessor, even though his government had another windfall when oil prices rose dramatically again in 1983. Venezuela had increased its indebtedness beyond the levels attained by the Perez government. There was much talk at the time of “bipolarity”, the belief that Venezuela was stuck forever in the cycle of AD-COPEI ruling alternatively, but basically following the same policies of high-spending, high-bureaucracy, and a statized economy. Unknown to any one but themselves, a group of junior-grade officers had formed a clique called the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement (MRB in Spanish) and it was led by then Captain Hugo Chavez Frias. One brash foreign policy initiative taken by Herrera either should have gladdened or encouraged militarists in Venezuela. When the Argentine military dictator and “dirty war” veteran, Leopoldo Galtieri, had the Falklands invaded in 1982, Venezuela officially, though not materially, backed the Argentine move, although most Venezuelans were not aware of Argentina’s claim on the islands and weren’t even fully informed of the government’s action. Venezuelans who traveled to London at the time got dirty looks from immigration officials which they couldn’t quite figure out.

            When dollars flooded Venezuela again, economists began talking of “overheating”, although it wasn’t clear whether they knew what they were talking about. It was pseudo-technical jargon, but Diaz Bruzual was among the adherents to this idea, if not the economist who got the “overheated” ball rolling. In the USA, president Jimmy Carter was fighting inflationary pressures and interests rates there, and in the industrialized nations generally, went up to unheard of levels. In Venezuela, a Canadian bank was offering interests as high as 21%. But because of the overheating thesis, Diaz Bruzual applied an old law whereby interest payments above 12% were considered usurious and illegal. Dollars started flowing out of Venezuela in the billions and the central bank, which had always been zealous about national reserves, took fright at their growing depletion, but instead of counter-acting with incentives to reverse the outward flow, the bolivar was officially devalued by over 50% on its previous 4.5 to the dollar. The government, in brief, was not going to subsidize the bolivar at its previous rate. But the measure encouraged a further massive flight of dollars and the government then clamped full currency control. There had been a brief period of exchange controls during the early years of the Venezuelan democracy, but basically Venezuela had never seen anything like this before. It was the end of “prosperity”, or what Venezuelans considered it to be. In Venezuela, statistics of unemployment are always used to show that the economy is or is not doing alright. The truth is that Venezuelan statistics were, and are, often meaningless, sometimes taken from development plans that did not materialize—such as saying that housing had gone up by such and such a percentage which was only what the government had planned but not necessarily what it accomplished—and among the most flagrant fictions were employment indexes. Venezuela is an underdeveloped economy, and in all such economies, not just Venezuela’s, employment includes sub-employment, which has never been officially recognized or defined, for there is no way that a country with a per capita GDP of around $5,000, or whatever below real economic development standards, can be said to have employment rates comparable to those in America or Europe. Nobody ever has known what the real, steady, and well-paid employment rate is, and “well-paid” only means near or slightly above the average national income per capita. It was in these conditions that the 1983 elections came about.

            The adecos chose Jaime Lusinchi and Caldera once more stood up for his party COPEI. The divided socialists offered Teodoro Petkoff and Jose Vicente Rangel. Teodoro Petkoff’s life is one of those surprising stories that Venezuelan history abounds in. His father was a Bulgarian communist chemical engineer who had been expelled from his country during the inter-war years and interned in Czechoslovakia. There he met his wife, a Jewish doctor from Poland, with a similar background. They were looking to emigrate to somewhere, but they wanted to go together. By a fortunate coincidence, they heard that a sugar mill carved out of the jungle in the south of Zulia state, in Venezuela, needed a doctor and an engineer. They grabbed the offer and settled in their new homeland. Teodoro was the eldest of their children and he was born in a clinic in Maracaibo rather than in the primitive conditions in which his parents worked. They also had a pair of twins, Luben and Marko, and the family eventually moved to Caracas. There, Teodoro became a leader of the communist party and was one of the sponsors of the urban guerrillas that threatened the Betancourt regime. The twins were not that leftist, but they were rowdy, and on an occasion when Luben got into a fight and his twin Marko hauled him out, the guy he was fighting shot into their car but killed Marko instead of Luben. The surviving twin was so guilt-stricken that he followed Teodoro into the insurrectionary movement and became the only really effective rural guerrilla leader that the communists had. Both Teodoro and Luben were amnestied during the Caldera presidency.

            Teodoro broke with the communist party and, with the veteran leader Pompeyo Marquez, founded in 1971 the Movement towards Socialsm (MAS in Spanish), which was more or less inspired by the Prague Spring, when Czech communists tried to liberalize their country in 1968. MAS was still Marxist but edging to left of center. Rangel was the son of a general during the Gomez autocracy, but he entered politics in 1958 as a moderate leftist. Rangel denounced the abuses of the adeco governments of Betancourt and Leoni—he accused them of allowing the secret police and the army to torture detainees—and he was the MAS presidential candidate in 1973 and 1978, both times doing badly. Teodoro was particularly disliked by adeco pardos, perhaps because he was red-headed and freckled. Teodoro was always trying to displace Rangel as his party’s choice and finally, in 1983, the two men had a chance to test each other’s popularity. Much of the campaign was taken up by an “underground” debate about Lusinchi’s “official” mistress, Blanca Ibañez, and adecos went around saying that his legal wife had simply “to bite the bullet”. When the results were in, bipolarity worked and the adecos proved that they still had the pardos on their side by garnering 56% of the vote, the highest margin ever in a Venezuelan election. Caldera was down, but, as we shall see, definitely not out. But there were two novelties in the results: although Petkoff got more votes than Rangel, together they got 7% of the vote, which the left had never before achieved, although it is questionable whether Teodoro at that point was in any way the radical he had been before. Another result was that abstentions were 12% and this was significant because, as we saw, voting was compulsory in Venezuela and by and large Venezuelans had been very dutiful in this respect, and now they showed that not voting was catching on. This tendency has gone up consistently since then and in all of Chavez’s victories non-voting Venezuelans have not been on average above 40%.

            By all accounts, the Lusinchi government was a monumental failure. Exchange-control, which was tiered so as to favor importers and investors, became a scandal in the many ways that it was manipulated to fuel corruption. If you were an insider, you could get the preferential rate for padding foreign bank accounts. Corruption had always been an issue in Venezuela, but under Lusinchi it became the issue and most Venezuelans considered that corruption, and not sheer incompetence, was the root of all of society’s ills. Lusinchi ditched his wife and married his mistress. There were uncounted horror stories of how Blanca Ibañez abused the power of her presidential husband to do whatever she wanted. Whether the extent of her power was as great as it was said, cannot be documented but she and her husband became the object of intense public hatred. The Venezuelan economy stagnated and the country at the end of Lusinchi’s regime was reportedly bankrupt. It would be reasonable to surmise that this should have been the end of bipolarity in the next elections, but it would be wrong. In the 1988 elections, the two ruling parties got a total of 93% of the vote. Petkoff fared very badly but abstentions went up to 18%. The winner was none other than Carlos Andres Perez, for his second term. (In the Venezuelan constitution you could be re-elected as many times as you wanted as long as it wasn’t in successive elections.) Now, the question is: how could a country whose descent into insolvency began with Perez, who had botched so badly his first term, when corruption flourished as never before, have re-elected him with a majority that was barely less than the one Lusinchi got? This enigma has various explanations. That pardos were still adecos is an obvious one. The opposition to bipolarity did not have a leader. It would make its entrance with a bang in 1992. But especially, Venezuelans of all hues simply remembered that during Perez’s first term there had been a lot of money in circulation, things over-all had not been so dismal, and somehow they figured that Perez’s could perform the miracle of making Venezuela “prosperous” again.

            But Perez was not the hand-out king he had been before. He had become a closet liberalizer and globalizer. His economic adviser was Moises Naim, today an influential editor in America, and he defined the presidential economic agenda, which included no price controls, privatizations, and laws, or their elimination, to attract foreign investments. Unfortunately, Naim began at the lowest rung of economic liberalization, which was freeing controls on prices and a modest increase in that of gasoline, which in Venezuela is sacrosantly very low, on a par with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In February 1989, barely into his second term, Perez faced a popular uprising, which he had the army crush with a death toll of around 200. It is known as the “caracazo” (from “Caracas”), where the rioting and looting was on an unforeseen scale. Chavez then was working on a political sciences degree at the Simon Bolivar University, where he was not likely to imbibe revolutionary ideas, for its rector had written a doctoral dissertation on the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, as obscure as Husserl’s own writings, and anyway the staff had many adecos. When Chavez studied there, the head of the department was a German with an interest in the genome.

            The duo Perez/Naim went on with their reforms, which had the full backing of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Venezuelan economy started picking up, but liberalization programs take time to yield results and Venezuelans, who are not very keen on private initiative, were resentful. Rightly or wrongly, Perez, who after his first presidency was a rich man, was singled out as Mr. Corruption himself. The MBR officers started plotting seriously and on 4th February 2002 they struck. Chavez was a lieutenant-commander, but generals were involved in the coup attempt. Its immediate objective was to capture Perez, who had recently returned from a junket. They almost had him cornered in the presidential palace, but he managed to escape to the presidential residence and from there he got loyal troops to corner Chavez in turn and arrest him. In exchange for prompting his co-conspirators to lay down their arms, Chavez, fully uniformed and unbowed, was allowed to speak on television to the entire nation. A Venezuelan anti-corruption hero, and as pardo as they come, had been born. On 27th November 2002, officers of higher rank than Chavez tried to overthrow Perez but this time around the conspiracy was easily put down. Perez’s downfall came when a legal process was begun to force to him reveal how he had used a secret but legal presidential fund, which he resolutely resisted. With the supreme court and congress ranged against him, Perez was imprisoned, for a while in a detention center, and then under house arrest. He handed the presidency in 2003 to Ramon J. Velasquez, an adeco politician/historian who had been his presidential secretary. Though nobody has charged Velasquez with corruption, his son was involved in an illegal pardon for drug-traffickers, but was not charged. Velasquez oversaw the elections of that year, and these were at once familiar and unique.

            Caldera, who had been candidate for the presidency six times and won once, wanted to have another go, but COPEI this time resisted, led by Herrera Campins, and Caldera founded his own brand-new political movement, called Convergencia. COPEI chose a mediocrity from within its ranks. The adecos chose the pardo Claudio Fermin. Petkoff had seen the futility of trying again and backed Caldera. Even Velasquez got into the act. When the returns were in, Caldera won and in the process shattered the bipolarity thesis. Abstentions reached a record of 40%. The main reason Caldera, who was 86 years old, won was in essence the same as for Perez’s victory in 1993: every body knew him and the middle classes, probably decisive for the only time in Venezuela’s history, thought that he could do the miracle that had been expected of Perez, that is, in some manner to get the country back on track to the “good old times”. Once back in the presidential palace, Caldera re-imposed exchange control, which had been lifted under Perez, and he started ruling as he was going to re-live his undistinguished presidency of 1979-2004. The economy plummeted and when Caldera decided to backtrack, and chose Petkoff to do the job, it was too late, although the state steel corporation, Sidor, was privatized. The most significant thing he did was to release Chavez and pardon all the military and civilian conspirators during the Perez regime. He didn’t know it but this generosity, which was part of a long Venezuelan tradition, would blow up in his face.