Military dictatorship in Venezuela

After the 1948 Venezuelan coup d'état brought an end to a three-year experiment in democracy ("El Trienio Adeco"), a triumvirate of military personnel controlled the government until 1952, when it held presidential elections.

These were free enough to produce results unacceptable to the government, leading them to be falsified, and to one of the three leaders, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, assuming the Presidency.

All versions of this incident are more or less agreed that someone's gun went off wounding the leader of the kidnappers, that Delgado Chalbaud was then hustled out of the car and he confronted his abductors, and that finally they shot him to death.

With his death, the remaining triumvirs chose a civilian president, Luis Germán Suárez Flamerich, who was dismissed by the military in 1952, and the ambitious Pérez Jiménez became dictator with the consent of Llovera Páez.

Pérez Jiménez, unlike most Venezuelans, received a thorough education from the military academies of Venezuela and Peru which he attended and graduated from with the highest honors.

Pérez Jiménez also had an efficient secret police, but the stories about tortures and killings were, like those about Gomez, mainly inventions by the frustrated adecos[citation needed], although whoever in Venezuela tried to be active clandestinely was sure to be either imprisoned or shot if he resisted.

Many of the emigrants did make a lot of money and chose Venezuela as their country, but as to industrializing or increasing agricultural production, their effect was not and is not noticeable; and this for the simple reason that the Venezuelan government considered that diversified industrial development was its responsibility and private citizens of any nationality—in this sense, it can be said that Venezuela is perhaps the most un-discriminatory country in the world—were given ample rights in the areas of commerce, of services, and of other ancillary activities.

Despite this insidious racism, it was under Pérez Jiménez that the mythification of the Amerindian caciques, who supposedly had resisted the conquistadors everywhere in Venezuela, was given a big boost, especially when an exchange house founded by an Italian immigrant (Italcambio) brought out a series of souvenir gold coins in which each cacique was depicted with facial traits that were invented out of whole cloth by Pérez Jiménez's laureate painter, Pedro Francisco Vallenilla.

Despite his rigorous Catholic upbringing, Pérez Jiménez also encouraged the underlying animism of Venezuelans when he erected in the middle of Caracas’ first speedway a statue of Maria Lionza, a sort of Amerindian goddess who sits atop a tapir and is much worshipped in a jungle sanctuary in Yaracuy in central Venezuela.

The author of this "face lifting" was Luis Malausena, whose taste was in all to Pérez Jiménez's sense of grandeur and went from the ultra-modern to a non-descript "neo-classicism".

Economically, Venezuela apparently was not doing so badly, but the signs of prosperity were mostly in the cities, and the countryside, where half of Venezuelans still lived, had social indexes way below what would have been expected from such a fiscally rich country.

On 11 June 1957 Fabricio Ojeda had invited two other Democratic Republican Union (URD) members and a Communist, Guillermo Garcia Ponce, to his home, and they agreed that the time was ripe to form a multi-partisan organisation aiming to overthrow Jiménez.

The air force rebels flew over Caracas and dropped randomly some bombs while a commander started out from Maracay with a column of tanks.

Finally, with various suitcases stuffed with dollars, Pérez Jiménez took off in his private DC-3 and sought refuge in the Dominican Republic, where his resilient colleague, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, had been ruling since 1930.

Thus it was that Wolfgang Larrazábal, an admiral who owed to Pérez Jiménez his rise in the services and who had never manifested any disaffection to him, was chosen to lead the country solely because he outranked every one else.

Overnight, without having lifted a finger to deserve it, Larrazábal became the idol of Caracas, though in the rest of Venezuela the pardos were still adecos to the tip of their tails.

Most importantly, the political parties, which were busily rebuilding their national organizations, gave him their total support, including the few but vociferous communists.

The population of the city soon doubled with these rural, barely educated newcomers, who were obviously strongly pro-Larrazábal but were also a potential source of political de-stabilization.

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.

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 Pérez Jiménez 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.

It says well of him 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.

During the Cuban Revolution of the 1950s, a number of liberal organisations in Venezuela declared their support for Fidel Castro's guerrilla operations against Batista.

The Venezuelan government refrained from taking a position on the Cuban rebellion, but unofficially during Larrazábal's Presidency contributed 50,000 dollars to Castro's revolutionaries.

The wily Betancourt, who sometimes is referred to as the "father of Venezuelan democracy" (much less in recent times[update] than before), insisted that the Communist Party of Venezuela 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 consensus that the parties would stick together in the defense of democracy from whatever threats might arise in the future.

Another significant pact that emerged during 1958 was the unspoken one by which the civilian political leadership, particularly Rómulo Betancourt, agreed not to interfere with the military in any way and let them run their own affairs.

Rafael Caldera had no rivals in COPEI, the party he founded, and he entered the political fray counting on the conservative middle class.

Jóvito 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.