Карлос Андрес Перес: Венесуэла президентінің өмірі мен саясаты

President of Venezuela, 1974–79 and 1989–93

Carlos Andrés Pérez Rodríguez (27 October 1922 – 25 December 2010) also known as CAP and often referred to as El Gocho (due to his Andean origins), was a Venezuelan politician and the president of Venezuela from 12 March 1974 to 12 March 1979 and again from 2 February 1989 to 21 May 1993. He was one of the founders of Acción Democrática, the dominant political party in Venezuela during the second half of the twentieth century. After the fall of dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez and returning from exile, Pérez served as the Interior Affairs Minister for Rómulo Betancourt between 1959 to 1964, when he became known for his tough response against guerrillas. His first presidency was known as the Saudi Venezuela due to its economic and social prosperity thanks to enormous income from petroleum exportation. However, his second presidency saw a continuation of the economic crisis of the 1980s, a series of social crises, widespread riots known as Caracazo and two coup attempts in 1992. In May 1993 he became the first Venezuelan president to be forced out of office by the Supreme Court on charges for the embezzlement of 250 million bolívars (roughly 2.7 million US dollars) belonging to a presidential discretionary fund, whose money was used to support the electoral process in Nicaragua and hire bodyguards for President Violeta Chamorro.

Carlos Andrés Pérez was born at the hacienda La Argentina, on the Venezuelan Colombian border near the town of Rubio, Táchira state, the 11th of 12 children in a middle class family. His father, Antonio Pérez Lemus, was a Colombian born coffee planter and pharmacist of Spanish Peninsular and Canary Islander ancestry who emigrated to Venezuela during the last years of the 19th century. His mother, Julia Rodríguez, was the daughter of a prominent landowner in the town of Rubio and the granddaughter of Venezuelan refugees who had fled to the Andes and Colombia in the wake of the Federal War, a civil war that ravaged Venezuela in the 1860s. Pérez was educated at the María Inmaculada School in Rubio, run by Dominican friars. His childhood was spent between the family home in town, a rambling Spanish colonial style house, and the coffee haciendas owned by his father and maternal grandfather. Influenced by his grandfather, an avid book collector, Pérez read voraciously from an early age, including French and Spanish classics by Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas. As he grew older, Pérez also became politically aware and managed to read Voltaire, Rousseau, and Marx without the knowledge of his deeply conservative parents. The combination of falling coffee prices, business disputes, and harassment orchestrated by henchmen allied to dictator Juan Vicente Gómez, led to the financial ruin and physical deterioration of Antonio Pérez, who died of a heart attack in 1936. This episode would force the widow Julia and her sons to move to Venezuela's capital, Caracas, in 1939, where two of Pérez's eldest brothers had gone to attend university. The death of his father had a profound impact on the young Pérez, bolstering his convictions that democratic freedoms and rights were the only guarantees against the arbitrary, and tyrannical, use of state power. In Caracas, Pérez enrolled in the renowned Liceo Andrés Bello, where he graduated in 1944 with a major in Philosophy and Letters. In 1944, he enrolled for three years in the Law School of the Central University of Venezuela and one year in the Law School of the Free University of Colombia. However, the intensification of his political activism would prevent Pérez from ever completing his law degree.

The political life of Carlos Andrés Pérez began at the age of 15, when he became a founding member of the Venezuelan Youth Association and a member of the National Democratic Party, both of which were opposed to the repressive administration of General Eleazar López Contreras, who had succeeded the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez in 1935. He also co operated with the first labour unions in his region. When he moved to Caracas, in 1939, he started an ascendant political career as a youth leader and founder of the Democratic Action (AD) party, in which he would play an important role during the 20th century, first as a close ally to party founder Rómulo Betancourt and then as a political leader in his own right. In October 1945, a group of civilians and young army officers plotted the overthrow of the government run by General Isaías Medina Angarita. At the age of 23, Pérez was appointed Private Secretary to the Junta President, Rómulo Betancourt, and became Cabinet Secretary in 1946. However, in 1948, when the military staged a coup against the democratically elected government of Rómulo Gallegos, Pérez was forced to go into exile (going to Cuba, Panama and Costa Rica) for a decade. He temporarily returned to Venezuela secretly in 1952 to complete special missions in his fight against the new dictatorial government. He was imprisoned on various occasions and spent more than two years in jail in total. In Costa Rica, he was active in Venezuelan political refugee circles, worked as Editor in Chief of the newspaper La República and kept in close contact with Betancourt and other AD leaders. In 1958, after the fall of dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, Pérez returned to Venezuela and participated in the reorganization of the AD Party. He served as Minister of Interior and Justice from 1959 to 1964 and made his mark as a tough minister and canny politician who worked to neutralize small, disruptive and radical right wing and left wing insurrections, the latter Cuban influenced and Cuban financed, that were being staged around the country. This was an important step in the pacification of the country in the mid to late 1960s, the consolidation of democracy and the integration of radical parties into the political process. Pérez was accused, however, of human rights violations during his tenure. After the end of the Betancourt administration and the 1963 elections, Pérez left government temporarily and dedicated himself to consolidating his support in the party. During this time, he served as head of the AD in Congress and was elected to the position of Secretary General of AD, a role that was crucial in laying the ground for his presidential ambitions.

In 1973, Carlos Andrés Pérez was nominated to run for the presidency for AD. Youthful and energetic, Pérez ran a vibrant and triumphalist campaign, one of the first to use the services of American advertising gurus and political consultants in the country's history. During the run up to elections, he visited nearly all the villages and cities of Venezuela by foot and walked more than 5800 kilometers. He was elected in December of that year, receiving 48.7% of the vote against the 36.7% of his main rival. Turnout in these elections reached an unprecedented 97% of all eligible voters, a level which has not been achieved since. One of the most radical aspects of Pérez's program for government was the notion that petroleum oil was a tool for developing countries like Venezuela to attain first world status and usher a fairer, more equitable international order. International events, including the Yom Kippur War of 1973, contributed to the implementation of this vision. Drastic increases in petroleum prices during the 1970s energy crisis led to an economic bonanza for the country just as Pérez started his term. Using high oil prices, Pérez bolstered his support, buying patronage by subsidizing prices, increasing wages and tripling public spending. His policies, including the nationalization of the iron and petroleum industries. Following the establishment of PDVSA, corruption in Venezuela as a system of patrimonialism was created. He also promoted investment in large state owned industrial projects for the production of aluminium and hydroelectric energy, infrastructure improvements and the funding of social welfare and scholarship programmes, were ambitious and involved massive government spending, to the tune of almost $53 billion. His measures to protect the environment and foster sustainable development earned the Earth Care award in 1975, the first time a Latin American leader had received this recognition. In the international arena, Pérez supported democratic and progressive causes in Latin America and the world. He reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba and submitted a resolution to the Organization of American States (OAS) that would have lifted economic sanctions against the country. He opposed the Somoza and Augusto Pinochet dictatorships and played a crucial role in the finalizing of the agreement for the transfer of the Panama Canal from American to Panamanian control. In 1975, with Mexican President Luis Echeverría, he founded SELA, the Latin American Economic System, created to foster economic cooperation and scientific exchange between the nations of Latin America. He also supported the democratization process in Spain, as he brought Felipe González, who was living in exile, back to Spain in a private flight and thus strengthened the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE). Additionally, he negotiated a treaty with the USSR that called for the USSR to supply oil to Venezuela's Spanish market in exchange for Venezuela supplying the Soviet market in Cuba. Towards the end of his first term in office, Pérez's faced criticism for excessive government spending.

He based his campaign for the 1988 Venezuelan general election in his legacy of abundance during his first presidential period and initially rejected liberalization policies. Venezuela's international reserves were only US$300 million at the time of Pérez' election into the presidency; Pérez decided to respond to the debt, public spending, economic restrictions and rentier state by liberalizing the economy. Carlos Andrés announced a technocratic cabinet and a group of economic policies to fix macroeconomic imbalances known as es , called by detractors as El Paquetazo Económico Pérez implemented such reforms without the support of political groups, including his own AD party, resulting with the AD blocking his future policies in Congress and pulling its support, with many perceiving the package as an act of betrayal. Among the policies there was the reduction of fuel subsidies and the increase of public transportation fares by thirty percent (VEB 16 Venezuelan bolívares, or US$0.4). a lack of timely intervention by authorities, as the Policía Metropolitana de Caracas was on a labor strike, led to the protests and rioting quickly spreading to the capital and other towns across the country. to extraofficial estimates of up to 5,000, the most violent period of unrest in Venezuela's democratic history. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reported that human rights in Venezuela deteriorated during Pérez's administration, with the latter human rights groups writing in 1993 that his "tenure was marked by an increase in human rights violations, including arbitrary detentions, torture, extrajudicial executions, the violent repression of popular demonstrations and protests." Torture in Venezuela during the Carlos Andrés Pérez administration was common according to Amnesty international, with the group saying that while the government and its laws condemned human rights abuses, authorities still performed torture methods that were "simple but sophisticated: they are designed to cause maximum pain with the minimum of marks." The most notable auction was CANTV's, a telecommunications company, which was sold at the price of US$1.885 billion to the consortium composed of American AT&T International, General Telephone Electronic and the Venezuelan Electricidad de Caracas and Banco Mercantil. The privatization ended Venezuela's monopoly over telecommunications and surpassed predictions, selling over US$1 billion above the base price and US$500 million more than the bid offered by its next competitor. By the end of the year, inflation had dropped to 31%, Venezuela's international reserves were now worth US$14 billion and there was an economic growth of 9% (called as an "Asian growth"), the largest in Latin America at the time. and during the process it was revealed that the money was used to support and hire bodyguards for President Violeta Chamorro. On 21 May 1993, the Supreme Court considered the accusation valid, and the following day the Senate voted to strip Pérez of his immunity. Many of those in the Senate who supported Pérez's impeachment were members of AD. In 1998 he was prosecuted again, this time on charges of embezzlement on public funds, accused of having secret joint bank accounts held in New York with his mistress, Cecilia Matos. Before the trial, he was elected to the Senate of Venezuela for his native State of Táchira, on the ticket of his newly founded party, Movimiento de Apertura y Participación Nacional (Apertura), thus gaining immunity from prosecutions. However, as the newly approved 1999 Constitution of Venezuela dissolved the Senate and created a unicameral National Assembly, Pérez lost his seat. In 1999 he ran again for the National Assembly, but did not gain a seat. While in Miami, following the Daktari Ranch affair, Pérez said that the plot was a hoax but that Chávez had to be forcibly removed, saying that "Chávez has rejected all the peaceful exits that have been presented to him" and "it is not that I am in favor of violence, but that there is no other way out of Chavez". In 2009, Venezuelan attorney general Luisa Ortega Díaz ordered the extradition of Pérez due to his implementation of the Plan Ávila.

At the age of 26 he married his first cousin Blanca Rodríguez with whom he had six children: Sonia, Thais, Martha, Carlos Manuel, María de Los Angeles and María Carolina. In the late 1960s, he began an extramarital relationship with his then secretary Cecilia Matos. He also had two daughters with Cecilia, María Francia and Cecilia Victoria Pérez, while married to Blanca Rodríguez. Matos became a notorious figure in Venezuelan politics beginning in the 1970s and through the 1990s, the result of rumours of corruption and trafficking of influence centred around her role as the President's mistress. Such allegations of corruption were damaging to Pérez's political standing. Although Pérez initiated divorce proceedings against his wife in 1998, the action failed and was discontinued. Until his death (see below), Pérez remained legally married to Blanca Rodríguez although he had been living in exile since 1998 with Matos, dividing his time between his homes in Miami, the Dominican Republic and New York. In 2003, he suffered a debilitating stroke that seriously affected his mental and physical abilities. On 31 March 2008, the secretary general of Acción Democrática, Henry Ramos Allup, announced that Pérez wanted to return to Venezuela from exile, to spend his last years in Caracas.

On 25 December 2010, Pérez was rushed to Mercy Hospital in Miami, where he died that same afternoon. The cause of death was initially reported as having been a heart attack, but was later referred to as "respiratory failure". It later emerged that Blanca Rodríguez and Pérez's four daughters and son learned of Pérez's death from a news website, as neither Matos nor her daughters notified them of the loss. Chávez offered condolences, but commented that he hopes Pérez's way of governing would not return to the country: "May he rest in peace. But with him  may the form of politics that he personified rest in peace and leave here forever." Pérez's relatives in Miami said that Pérez would be buried in Miami and that they have no intention of returning his remains to Venezuela until Chávez was no longer in office. but later they denied having reached to an agreement. On 4 October 2011, the remains of Carlos Andrés Pérez were brought back to Venezuela, nine months after his death. The casket arrived in a flight originated from Atlanta, Georgia, escorted by Mayor of Caracas Antonio Ledezma, friend of Pérez and member of Democratic Action (AD). Once in Caracas it was transported to the Headquarters of AD, where over 5,000 people waited to see the hearse and the casket covered with the Venezuelan flag. Pérez remains were interred on Thursday 6 October 2011. Cecilia Matos died in Bogotá, Colombia, of "kidney and respiratory problems," one of her daughters told Efe. She was 66. The death of Cecilia Matos came 25 days after Pérez was buried in Venezuela, following a prolonged family dispute about where his final resting place should be.

The documentary film CAP 2 Intentos (English: CAP 2 Attempts), directed by es, focuses on the two non consecutive presidential tenures of Andrés Pérez. Oteyza later released another documentary, CAP Inédito (CAP Unedited), featuring including previously unpublished material and from a private point of view.