The other day I spent some time talking with two successful American immigrants of Venezuelan origin, who highlighted a connection between Caldera and the recent US Supreme Court’s decision on Trump’s involvement with the Capitol riots.
There is one.
Caldera was a prominent Venezuelan politician and intellectual who served two terms as president, one between 1969 and 1974, the other between 1994 and 1999.
He was a democratic man who led a then prosperous and advancing nation.
But unrest had been stirring throughout Latin America, incited by Fidel Castro in Cuba. Venezuela was no exception.
On February 4th 1992, Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chavez, a Castro follower, led a coup against then president Carlos Andres Perez. The coup failed and he was imprisoned. But the plotting continued and other officers attempted a second coup in November the same year. It, too, failed.
Over 140 people were killed in the first coup, about 50 in the second.
In early 1994, Caldera — at age 78 — was reelected to a second term as president. The following month he pardoned Chavez, who then walked out of prison and started his campaign for president. Five years later, in 1999, he succeeded Caldera and so began the full embrace of Fidel Castro’s ideas and the gradual destruction of a dynamic and evolving nation.
Over the following years and until his death in 2013, Hugo Chavez installed himself as king and steadily wrecked his…
