Word: rez
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Firm Hand, Fast Engine. Almost anywhere else, a hot-rodding President, with or without office cares, would be an unusual spectacle. But in Venezuela, that famed, throbbing boom land of South America, the spectacular is commonplace. Four years ago Colonel Pérez Jiménez, then 36, put together an unbeatable combination of nerve and luck to seize dictatorial power in Venezuela; today, growing in influence to the stepped-up beat of the boom, he is a key man in Latin American politics. But though the hard-driving President keeps a firm hand on the wheel, it is Venezuela...
...Venezuelan Presidents from 1899 to 1945 came from a section of the Andes around San Cristóbal. Marcos Pérez Jiménez comes from nearby Michelena, a tiny settlement founded by one of his ancestors, where he was born on April 25, 1914. His father, 70 years old at the time, was a small-time cattleman and coffee planter, his mother a schoolteacher from Colombia...
...officer too. His nearsightedness barred him from his first choice, the air force, so he took the school's two-year course in artillery, and at 18 got his first command, a battery of two venerable cannon. After a stretch of teaching at the academy, Pérez Jiménez finished his own military education with three years at the Peruvian War College in Lima. By 1945 he was a major, and-like 16 other young war-school graduates -rebelliously resentful that his studies had brought him only low pay and petty commands under politically appointed generals...
...less resentful was a politico named Rómulo Betancourt, whose left-wing but anti-Communist party, Acción Democrática (A.D.) was having rough going at the hands of the general then in the presidency. One night Pérez Jiménez and a few other officers secretly sought out Betancourt. Said Pérez Jiménez: "Why don't you come along with us in a movement that would dignify the country and purify the armed forces?" Army and A.D. joined in a successful revolution that killed 300 and wounded...
...Barbara) Rómulo Gallegos, winning three to one. Most important, A.D. worked out and ratified the historic 50-50 contract with the oil companies-the golden rule that was later to benefit no one more than the officer Betancourt assigned as army chief of staff: Marcos Pérez...