Carlos Andrés Pérez
Carlos Andrés Pérez was president of Venezuela from 1974 to 1979 and from 1989 to 1993, the Democratic Action politician from the Andes who was Betancourt's interior minister in the guerrilla years and won the election of 1973 with the largest vote yet. It was on the eve of the oil price's quadrupling, and his first presidency was the Saudi Venezuela of the 1970s. The oil was nationalised on New Year's Day 1976 with the creation of PDVSA, the iron ore nationalised the year before. There were the steel mills, the aluminium, the hydroelectric dams, the Caracas metro begun, and the scholarships that sent ten thousand students abroad. There was the debt that quadrupled to pay for it, and a corruption the country called the party's, and his. The second, won in December 1988 on the memory of the first, began with the paquete, the IMF programme of February 1989 that freed the prices and doubled the petrol. On 27 February came the Caracazo, the riots in Caracas over the bus fares that the army put down over five days with somewhere between three hundred and three thousand dead, the wound from which the democracy of Punto Fijo did not recover. Then came the two coup attempts of 1992, the first in February led by a lieutenant-colonel named Hugo Chávez, who surrendered on television saying that the objectives had not been achieved for now, which made him. He was born in Rubio in Táchira in 1922, the son of a coffee planter, was Betancourt's private secretary at twenty-three in the junta of 1945. He was jailed and exiled by Pérez Jiménez. He came back to be the interior minister of 1962-63 who ran the war against the guerrillas with a hardness the left never forgave and the party rewarded. His nickname was the man who walks, from the campaign of 1973 in which he walked the country, and CAP. The second presidency ended in impeachment. The supreme court found in May 1993 that he had misused seventeen million dollars of a secret fund, some of it to help Violeta Chamorro's security in Nicaragua. The Senate removed him, he was convicted in 1996 and served two years under house arrest. Chávez, pardoned by Caldera, was elected in 1998 on the ruin of the parties Pérez had led. He was elected to the Senate in 1998 and never took the seat. He left the country in 2000 when the new government reopened the cases. He lived in Miami, where he died on Christmas Day 2010 at eighty-eight. His body was kept in a Miami mausoleum for a year while his wife and his companion disputed it, and is now in Caracas.
- Lived: 1922 CE – 2010 CE
- Nationality: Venezuelan
- Roles: president, politician
