Venezuela: The Life and Times of the Party System - Political ...

to destroy his enemies. In so doing, he definitively closed the books on nineteenth-century
political life. Traditional political parties and military caudillos disappeared; political opposition
and protest soon began to take new tacks, working for the creation of mass politics and political
democracy.
The development of the petroleum industry from the 1920s on made for radical
discontinuities with the past. Agriculture was destroyed, permanent national armies and
bureaucracies were created, roads were built and massive waves of internal migration began to
travel on them. The political parties whose conflicts had dominated nineteenth-century politics
left no trace at all.
The new social groups and forces being created had little connection to older elites or to
the social or political structures of the past. Their new experiences and urgent needs found no
legitimate organizational expression, few interlocutors, and no reliable allies. Effective repression
saw to that, and thus in curious and doubtless unintended ways the Gomez autocracy laid the
bases of modern political life, leaving an open field and a growing potential clientele to the
organizers of new movements. Most significant among these were the university students and
trade unionists who first appear on the national scene in the 1920s, later returning from exile and
prison after the dictator’s death in late 1935. As Ramon J. Velasquez puts it, the Venezuela they
found was “like plowed land, waiting for the seed” (Velasquez, 1973, xix-xx).
It is thus fair to say that modern Venezuelan life began with the death of Gomez.
Subsequent political history falls into four broad periods: 1936-45, 1945-48, 1948-58, and the
post-1958 years when democracy is reestablished, successfully defended, and consolidated.
Here we review the pre-1958 years very briefly and then consider the democratic period in closer
detail.
The decade after 1935 witnessed both the conception and birth of mass politics in
Venezuela. Exiles returned eager to organize a new kind of political life that would expand
politics and opposition beyond student protest or military conspiracy to include what are now
commonly known as “popular sectors.” From its formal beginnings in 1941, Acción Democrática,
still the nation’s dominant party, has called itself “the party of the people,” brokering a marriage of
needs and interests between small-town middle-class organizers and Venezuela’s masses of
dispossessed so powerful that repression could no longer eliminate groups: it just drove them
underground.
Gomez was followed in office by his Minister of War and designated successor, Gen.
Eleazar Lopez Contreras, who tried to keep the lid on change. Incipient trade unions and political
groups were banned, open mass activities were prohibited, and control of the army and state
machine remained in the hands of the Andean group that had ridden to victory with Gomez.
Lopez Contreras was succeeded five years later by his Minister of War, Gen. Isaias Medina