Word: caldera
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Venezuela's men & women for president of the republic was Novelist Rómulo Gallegos, a founder in 1941 of Acción Democrática, which has controlled the government since the swift revolution of 1945. His victory over his nearest rival, 31-year-old Rafael Caldera, candidate of the conservative COPEI (Committee for Independent Political Organization), had been forecast from the start...
...campaign had been heated but clean-cut, with a minimum of mudslinging. Loser Caldera accused Acción Democrática of "exclusivism," and charged the government with Communist tendencies. (The Communist candidate ran a poor third.) Of Gallegos, he said: "Nobody doubts the sincerity of Gallegos and nobody believes in the sincerity of Acción Democrática...
Gallegos' speeches had a New Deal flavor; he advocated state-aided economic development, warned against Falangism. When charges of "atheism" and "ungodliness" were hurled against him and his party, he countered by denouncing Venezuela's Jesuits as "foreign representatives of France," accused Caldera's party of claiming to be "the instrument of a divine miracle." But Gallegos promised to respect all religion, and in the end the religious issue seemed to have affected the election outcome not at all. The important thing to Venezuelans was that democracy was finally having its day and that Gallegos seemed able...
...Gallegos (TIME, Sept. 29), Caldera last week picked the Caracas bull ring for the opening speech of his campaign. After the cheers had rolled away, he outlined his party's "Social Christianity" program. "The rich should be less rich, the poor less poor," he said. He asked more rights for labor. Pumping away with his right arm, he attacked the Marxism of Acción Democrática, called for "social peace" to replace the class struggle. Caldera, whose party has church support (it accuses Acción of being anti-Catholic), plumped for a concordat that would abolish...
...COPEI's crowded headquarters in an old tumbledown house in the north end of the capital, Caldera talked of the campaign. Said he: "We have no great illusions. Our fight will be important in the civic and educational sense." A year ago, in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, COPEI polled about 220,000 votes to Acción's 1,200,000; Caldera was one of 19 COPEI members elected to face Action's 137. This week Caldera begins a 20-state tour; the ex-schoolteacher will learn a lot of civics between now and election...