Puntofijo Pact

1958 power sharing arrangement between Venezuela's three main political parties

The Puntofijo Pact (or Punto Fijo Pact) was a formal arrangement arrived at between representatives of Venezuela's three main political parties in 1958, Acción Democrática (AD), COPEI (Social Christian Party), and Unión Republicana Democrática (URD), for the acceptance of the 1958 presidential elections and the preservation of the new democratic system. The pact was a written guarantee that the signing parties would respect the election results, prevent single party hegemony, share power, and collaborate to prevent dictatorship. The Puntofijo pact is often credited with launching Venezuela towards democracy, being recognized for creating the most stable period in the republican history of Venezuela. While it provided the grounds for possible democratic deepening, it has also been criticized for enabling an inflexible two party system between AD and COPEI.

On January 23, 1958, President Marcos Pérez Jiménez fled Venezuela for the Dominican Republic and a group of military leaders took control of the country. The presidency of Pérez Jiménez was a dictatorship that relied heavily on oil revenues to pay for a massive urbanization and modernization campaign in the cities of Venezuela. Both Betancourt and Caldera would go on to become presidents of Venezuela. The pact served to deepen democracy in the region in that it ensured respect of the democratic process of the election. This allowed for the uncontested democratic election of Rómulo Betancourt, and Betancourt would go on for the first time in the Venezuelan history of the 20th century to finish the tenure of a government elected by universal suffage. In 1962, URD refused to sign the Costa Rica agreement, which excluded Cuba from the Inter American system. The decision was accompanied by the immediate withdrawal of the tripartite coalition in the government of Rómulo Betancourt.

COPEI and AD became increasingly reliant on the shared oil revenues to secure their power over Venezuelan politics through a system of patronage and clientelism, and the bipartisanship began to deteriorate in the 1980s as oil revenues took a sharp decline. More formal opposition emerged in the late 1980s. One of the first indicators of public unrest was on the Caracazo on 27 February 1989, where there were riots due to a sharp and sudden increase in the prices of public transportation and gas. In the 1993 presidential elections the former leader of COPEI, Rafael Caldera, was elected president under a different party, Convergencia. Presidential candidate Hugo Chávez ran on a platform of attacking the AD and COPEI bipartisanship in his 1998 election campaign, promising to break the traditional system.