Marcos Pérez Jiménez
Marcos Pérez Jiménez ruled Venezuela for six years on oil money and concrete, and was overthrown in a week. Born in 1914 in the Andes near the Colombian border, he graduated first in his class from the military academy and was one of the young officers who took part in the coup of 1945 that put the reformist Acción Democrática in power. He took part in the coup that removed them three years later. The junta that followed held an election in 1952, and when the returns showed the opposition winning it stopped counting and declared Pérez Jiménez president. His programme was called the New National Ideal, and it was development as engineering. Oil revenues were enormous — Venezuela was the world's largest exporter at the time — and went into motorways, the Caracas-La Guaira viaduct, a steel plant at Guayana, hydroelectricity on the Caroní, hotels, a hospital, and superblocks of public housing that replaced hillside barrios. European immigration was encouraged and hundreds of thousands of Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese arrived. The politics were a secret police, the Seguridad Nacional, with concentration camps at Guasina, torture, and exile for the entire opposition leadership. Corruption was on a scale that even his own officers found excessive. He was overthrown on 23 January 1958 by a combination of a naval mutiny, a general strike and mass demonstrations, and flew out with suitcases of cash. He was extradited from the United States in 1963, tried for embezzlement, and lived out his life in Madrid. The date of his fall became a Venezuelan national holiday and the beginning of forty years of civilian rule. He nonetheless polls well in retrospect, which is what happens when a dictatorship coincides with an oil boom and the memory of the buildings outlasts the memory of the camps.
- Lived: 1914 CE – 2001 CE
- Nationality: Venezuelan
- Roles: dictator, general, head_of_state
