First presidency of Rafael Caldera

The first presidency of Rafael Caldera took place from 1969 to 1974. He was elected by only 33,000 votes. He was sworn in as president in March 1969—the first time in the country's 139-year history that an incumbent government peacefully surrendered power to the opposition.

Rafael Caldera

The victory of Copei's Caldera after 11 years of Democratic Action (AD) rule proved that Venezuela was indeed a two-party state. During the Betancourt presidency, AD had produced a radical offshoot led by Domingo Alberto Rangel, but as it was banned it could not participate in the 1963 elections. AD had a core of leaders and still another offshoot was led by one of these, but they suffered a heavy defeat in the same elections. The rural clientelist system was definitely working. But during 1968, according to the "Buggins's turn" rule that the party applied, a referendum was held in which the two rival adecos were Luis Beltran Prieto Figueroa, a leading intellectual, and Gonzalo Barrios, a politician who was the leading light in the so-called "Parisian circle" within the party and whose turn it definitely wasn’t. As the vote was an internal party affair the true results are not really known. It is as likely that Prieto Figueroa won as that he didn’t, but the party hierarchy claimed that Barrios had and Barrios became the official candidate. Prieto Figueroa was incensed and he formed his own party whose secretary general was Jesus Angel Paz Galarraga. Caldera was anything if not obstinate and he had been the losing Social Christian COPEI candidate in the elections of 1947, 1958 and 1963. This time (1968) Caldera's perseverance paid off and he won against runner up Barrios by the slim margin of 30,000. In another Latin American country this would have provoked turbulence, as even in America Bush's electoral margin in 2000 did in a legal sense, but not in Venezuela. Caldera thus became president by the skin of his teeth. Prieto Figueroa came in third, but amazingly a party that had been formed by nostalgic Pérezjimenistas and had no organization whatever obtained around a quarter of the vote for Congress, and this was happening less than ten years since the dictator's overthrow.

Democracy functioned, but did not fulfil everybody's expectations. Pérez Jiménez himself won election to a seat in the Senate, but when he returned in the belief that Venezuela would respect the election result, the adecos had already had their complaisant judges issue orders of arrest on one pretext or another and at the airport Pérez Jiménez was mobbed by adeco thugs. He fled Venezuela looking very scared, never to return from his Madrid mansion. This was a clear demonstration that elections in Venezuela had to be won by the right people or else. And not only that: the democratic Venezuelan government wasn’t even respectful of Venezuelan civil liberties as was shown when Caldera had a highly disrespectful magazine with a respectable circulation, called Reventon, shut down by the military with the unlikely charge that it had insulted the armed forces by saying that some soldiers were gay (statistically inevitable) . In his political past, Caldera had been pro-business, but in his incarnation as president he increased government intervention in the economy. He was hamstrung by Congress, which was controlled by the adecos, so bureaucracy was kept at the same level it had been, but the new government applied unabashedly the "to the victors belong the spoils" practice. The leftist parties, of which now there were many more than in 1958, were legalized. Towards the end of his government, oil prices increased sensationally but fiscal revenues came into the state's coffers too late for Caldera to use them to shape up his party's muscles. There was also an eye-popping building boom in Caracas but suspiciously the new constructions were going up but not into the market.