Rómulo Betancourt
Rómulo Betancourt was president of Venezuela from 1945 to 1948, as the head of the junta that the young officers and his party Democratic Action installed in the October revolution, and from 1959 to 1964, elected, the first president in the country's history to hand the office to an elected successor, which is why the country calls him the father of its democracy. The first period gave Venezuela universal suffrage and the election of 1947 that made the novelist Gallegos president, the fifty-fifty split of the oil revenue with the companies that became the world's model, and the coup of November 1948 that put Pérez Jiménez's officers in for ten years and Betancourt in exile in Cuba, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico and New York. The second, after the dictator's fall in January 1958 and the pact of Punto Fijo of that October in which the three democratic parties agreed to share power and respect the result, was the constitution of 1961, the land reform that gave a hundred and fifty thousand families plots. There was the founding of OPEC in Baghdad in 1960 on his oil minister Pérez Alfonzo's initiative, and the Betancourt doctrine of recognising no government that came by coup. There were the Cuban-backed guerrillas he fought in the hills and the barracks risings he put down, and the car bomb that Trujillo's agents detonated beside his motorcade in June 1960 that burned his hands and killed his aide. There was the election of December 1963, held under guerrilla threat, that Leoni won and to whom he handed the sash in March 1964. He was born in Guatire in 1908, the son of a Canary Islander shopkeeper, was a student leader of the generation of 1928 against Gómez and went into exile at twenty. He was a Communist in Costa Rica in his twenties and repudiated it. He founded Democratic Action in 1941 as the social democratic party of the oil workers and the peasants. He spent twenty of his years between 1928 and 1958 in exile. He refused to run again, wrote Venezuela: Oil and Politics, lived in Berne and New York. He came home to be the party's elder through the governments of the 1970s. He died in New York in September 1981. The democracy he founded lasted another eighteen years before Chávez, who called the Punto Fijo pact the crime he had been elected to end.
- Lived: 1908 CE – 1981 CE
- Nationality: Venezuelan
- Roles: president, politician
