Why was betancourt so successful in venezuela

This feature necessarily did not make the older officers holding posts outside the Caracas area completely happy but he was not aware that this was going to cause any overthrow movement to develop in the Armed Forces. He said that the tactics of AD at this time were to make plans to unite with other opposition parties like URD and COPEI to present a single presidential candidate in the promised elections. A likely candidate, he said, would be Eugenio Mendoza , wealthy and prominent Caracas businessman.

But Betancourt stressed that the unified opposition would make no pacts with the Communists. In this manner the preelectoral political scene in Venezuela would be somewhat tranquilized. As the Andorran probe got underway, trouble brewed in the United States, too. Normally, he said, energy companies go back and forth on drafts repeatedly. Rosenau, who no longer works for ProEnergy, gave file copies to prosecutors.

Investigators at the U. Betancourt and Derwick are subjects of the investigation, these people said. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. In December , the Justice Department asked Switzerland for information on Derwick accounts held there, according to a Swiss court ruling approving the request.

Through earlier investments, he learned about Hawkers, then three years old. The founders had created buzz with hip, affordable sunglasses. By , annual sales had reached 22 million euros. When his guests asked about his past in Venezuela, Betancourt said little. The founders planned to ask for 35 million euros. They agreed. To celebrate, they rode all-terrain vehicles around the 1,hectare estate. Hawkers announced the investment in October He appointed a brother and a sister to finance and marketing positions, company reports show.

He also suggested changes to the business. Two people familiar with the discussions said he pushed Hawkers to open retail shops. Costs ballooned, causing a 10 million euro loss in , financial statements show. Betancourt also sought personal favors, two people familiar with his requests told Reuters.

He asked the founders to use their Internet skills to optimize Google results so only positive news about him appeared, these people said. In late , most of the founders relinquished their stakes. For an additional 20 million euros, Betancourt became majority owner. The following year, another U. Krull, with seven others, was charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering by the U. The administration undertook a revolutionary program of land redistribution, diversification of the economy, the institution of a modern educational system as well as ambitious housing and social welfare programs.

Community development programs encouraged initiative in a traditionally passive population. Land redistribution took place without expropriation.

National planning provided for a mixed economy to assure the private sector of a role in the new Venezuela. Organized labor and peasant federations received the attentions of a benevolent administration. Petroleum wealth now supplied the funds for furthering reform. To escape the effects of a monocultural economy, Betancourt initiated plans to develop manufacturing and agriculture.

The five year record of the revolution is impressive. Despite economic crisis during the initial years of the regime, Venezuela achieved a favorable trade balance by with a surplus of five million dollars. In two years 3, families received a million and a half acres of land. Although organized labor has never been more powerful there were only 38 strikes during the first four years of the administration while 2, collective agreements were signed between labor and management.

Unemployment has risen to a national average of twelve per cent and to the critical peak of twenty per cent in Caracas. Historians invariably point to Betancourt's inauguration as the pivotal point in four centuries of Venezuelan history.

Not since its discovery by Spanish explorers in the late fifteenth century had an event so clearly marked a new era for the country.

After nearly a century and a half as perhaps the most extreme example of Latin America's postindependence affliction of caudillismo and military rule, Venezuela's political life after was defined by uninterrupted civilian constitutional rule. Betancourt and his AD colleagues had apparently learned from the disastrous consequences of their strident posture during their previous stint at governing.

They now reversed themselves by granting concessions to a broad range of political forces that included many of their most bitter enemies during the trienio.

They guaranteed, for example, the continuation of obligatory military service; improved salaries, housing, and equipment for the military; and, most important, amnesty from prosecution for crimes committed during the dictatorship.

In what amounted to guarantees to the foreign and local business communities, the parties agreed to respect the principles of capital accumulation and the sanctity of private property. With respect to agrarian properties, any expropriation or transfer of title would provide for compensation to the original owner. Betancourt made other conciliatory moves as well. A new labor code granted unprecedented government guarantees of the right to association and collective bargaining.

Vastly enlarged state subsidies benefited the poor in such areas as food, housing, and health care. The objective was to institutionalize a "prolonged political truce" by including as many citizens as possible within a popular consensus in favor of the civilian, democratic project. The "Spirit of the 23rd of January" informed the constitution, which guaranteed a wide range of civil liberties and created a weak bicameral legislature, where partisan political conflict could be aired but would cause a minimum of damage.

The president was given considerable power, although he was allowed to run for reelection only after sitting out two five-year terms. The major group excluded from the political pacts of was the extreme left. This exclusion was the result, initially, of the doctrinal anticommunism of AD--and of Betancourt in particular. The exclusion was subsequently perpetuated by the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in and the revolution's precipitous radicalization during the early s.

The Cuban Revolution had a profound impact on the Venezuelan left, particularly among student groups, who saw it as a model for a successful revolutionary effort in Venezuela. AD also suffered the loss of most of its student wing, which in April of that year split from the party to form the Movement of the Revolutionary Left Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria--MIR , supposedly to protest delays in the implementation of the government's agrarian reform program.

In these groups, together with the PCV, consolidated their advocacy of antigovernment guerrilla warfare. The FALN engaged in rural and urban guerrilla activities throughout the remainder of the s. The FALN failed, however, to attract adherents among the poor, whether rural campesinos or the residents of the makeshift shacks, known as ranchos , that made up Caracas's mushrooming slum areas.

As political scientist Daniel H. Levine points out, the FALN's effect proved to be quite the contrary of what it intended: it actually consolidated the democratic regime by making AD look--to its many former enemies on the right--like the better of two alternatives.

At the same time, the insurgency provided a vital military mission to the armed forces, one that removed them still further from direct participation in politics. In the midst of this guerrilla campaign, the government arrested all PCV and MIR congressmen in September, and in November military forces discovered a three-ton cache of small arms--with clear links back to the Castro regime--on a deserted stretch of beach.

Castro was not Betancourt's only enemy in the Caribbean, however. The Venezuelan president's strong-willed antipathy for nondemocratic rule was reflected in the so-called Betancourt Doctrine, which denied Venezuelan diplomatic recognition to any regime, right or left, that came to power by military force.

Highly unfavorable circumstances in the external sector of the economy handicapped the Betancourt administration. Aimed not at addressing social grievances but rather at reversing Venezuela's protracted decline in agricultural production, AD's land reform distributed only unproductive private properties and public lands.

Landowners who had their properties confiscated received generous compensation. By the end of the s, an estimated , heads of household had received provisional titles to their new properties.

Perhaps the greatest of all Betancourt's accomplishments, however, were the successful elections. Despite myriad threats to disrupt the process, nearly 90 percent of the electorate participated on December 1 in what was probably the most honest election in Venezuela to that date.

On March 11, , for the first time in the nation's history, the presidential sash passed from one constitutionally elected chief executive to another. It was a day of immense pride for the people of Venezuela.

Leoni, a hard-working but less colorful figure than Betancourt, differed little from his reformist predecessor from an ideological standpoint.