Pérez Jiménez Takes Power in Venezuela
A military coup removed the novelist Rómulo Gallegos from the Venezuelan presidency in November 1948, nine months after he had become the country's first freely elected head of state. The same officers had installed him. A junta including Marcos Pérez Jiménez had overthrown the previous government in 1945 in alliance with the Acción Democrática party, and the three years that followed — the trienio — brought universal suffrage, a constituent assembly and an election in which Gallegos took nearly three-quarters of the vote. What the officers objected to was what the party then did with it: land reform, a fifty-fifty split of oil revenues with the companies, an expanded education budget, and a determination to subordinate the military to civilian control. Gallegos refused to dismiss his defence minister or to send party leaders into exile, and was deposed and flown to Cuba. Pérez Jiménez emerged as the dominant figure and ruled outright from 1952, after annulling an election he had lost. His decade was funded by oil at high prices and spent on concrete — motorways, the Humboldt hotel on a mountaintop, workers' housing blocks, and the university city in Caracas — while the Seguridad Nacional imprisoned, tortured and disappeared opponents. He was overthrown by a general strike and a military revolt in January 1958 and flew to the Dominican Republic with a large quantity of public money. The parties then signed the Punto Fijo pact to share power and exclude the communists, and Venezuela was a functioning democracy for forty years. Pérez Jiménez was extradited in 1963, convicted of embezzlement, and was elected to the Senate from prison. He died in Madrid in 2001.
- Year: 1948 CE
- Category: Political
