Rafael Antonio Caldera Rodríguez (Spanish pronunciation: [rafaˈel anˈtonjo kalˈdeɾa roˈðɾiɣes] ; 24 January 1916 – 24 December 2009) was a Venezuelan politician, academic, and author who served as the 46th and 51st president of Venezuela from 1969 to 1974 and from 1994 to 1999. He co-founded the Christian Democratic party COPEI and helped draft the 1961 Constitution. He was one of the leading figures in Venezuelan democratic politics during the second half of the 20th century and a pioneer of the Christian Democratic movement in Latin America.
During his first presidency, Caldera pursued a policy of national pacification that ended the country's long-running left-wing insurgency. His administration oversaw Venezuela's first peaceful democratic transfer of power from the governing party to the opposition, restored diplomatic relations with socialist countries, and enacted measures that paved the way for the nationalization of the oil industry.
After serving in the Senate and holding leadership positions in several international organizations, Caldera was elected to a second presidential term in 1993. His administration faced a severe banking crisis, recession, and falling oil prices, and implemented economic reforms while promoting anti-corruption initiatives and labour and social security reforms. It also included the pardon of participants in the 1992 coup attempts, including Hugo Chávez, who was elected president in 1998.
In addition to his political career, Caldera taught law for over two decades, published numerous books and essays on law, politics, history, and Christian Democracy, and was a member of the Venezuelan National Academy of Language and the Venezuelan National Academy of Political and Social Sciences.
Youth, education and early achievements
Rafael Caldera Rodríguez, the son of Rafael Caldera Izaguirre and Rosa Sofía Rodríguez Rivero, was born on 24 January 1916, in San Felipe, Venezuela. His mother having died when he was two and a half years-old, Caldera was raised by his maternal aunt María Eva Rodríguez Rivero and her husband Tomás Liscano Giménez.
Caldera attended elementary school in his native San Felipe and later in Caracas, at the Jesuit-run Catholic school San Ignacio de Loyola, where he completed his secondary education at the age of fifteen. The following year he began law studies at the Central University of Venezuela.
As a young university student, Caldera exhibited a precocious intellectual brilliance. At the age of nineteen, and after studying the 26 volumes of Andrés Bello's collected works, Caldera published his first book, Andres Bello, a comprehensive analysis of the life and works of Bello's literary, linguistic, legal, historic, philosophical, and political texts. This book received an award from the Venezuelan National Academy of Language in 1935, and has remained an indispensable reference for scholarship studies on the most prominent Venezuelan man-of-letters of the 19th century.
Caldera was a student of Manuel Aguirre and was introduced to Luigi Sturzo by Aguirre.
A year later, Venezuelan President López Contreras took notice of newspaper op-ed pieces about labor issues written by the young twenty-year-old Caldera. Contreras appointed him deputy director of the newly created National Labor Office. From this position, Caldera played a major role in the drafting of Venezuela's first Labor Law, which remained current for more than fifty years until its reform in 1990. The international lawyer Wilfred Jenks, who drafted the Declaration of Philadelphia on labor rights and served two terms as Director-General of the International Labour Organization (ILO), an affiliated agency of the League of Nations, visited Venezuela in 1936 to review the law. He worked closely with Caldera, then Venezuela's first ILO correspondent. Jenks later stated that the International Labor Code published under his guidance on the eve of the Second World War, contained several topics that were arranged in a manner that had originally been employed in the Venezuelan draft Labor Code.
During his university years, Caldera became actively engaged in student politics. He joined the Venezuelan Federation of Students (FEV), which was led by students who had revolted in 1928 against the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez and were known as the Generation of 28. Although significantly younger than his peers, Caldera courageously split from this student federation after its leadership called for anticlerical reforms demanding the expulsion of the Jesuits and other religious orders from Venezuela.
In 1936, Caldera founded the National Student Union (UNE), the seed of what eventually became the Venezuelan Christian Democratic movement.
The first thirty years (1939–1969)
After graduating from university, Caldera founded National Action, a political movement formed to participate in municipal elections. Soon after, he founded the National Action Party and was elected in January 1941, at the age of twenty-five, to the Chamber of Deputies for his native state of Yaracuy.
As a congressman, he strongly opposed the bill that led to the 1941 boundary treaty with Colombia. He also had a prominent role in the debates on the partial reform of the 1936 Constitution and revisions to the Civil Code, and was a leading voice in the enactment of progressive labor laws. On 27 October 1945, Caldera was appointed Solicitor General by Rómulo Betancourt, head of the Revolutionary Government Junta that ousted President Isaías Medina Angarita on 18 October 1945.
On 13 January 1946, Caldera co-founded COPEI, Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente (Independent Political Electoral Organization Committee), the Christian Democratic Party that grew to become one of the two largest mass political parties in Venezuela. COPEI's first statement of principles was inspired by the social teaching of the papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931) and embraced democracy, pluralism and social reform.
Four months later, on 13 April 1946, Caldera resigned from his position as Solicitor General in protest against the continuous violent attacks that members of his newly created party were suffering from government supporters.
In 1946, he was elected as a representative to the National Constituent Assembly, inaugurated on 17 December of that year. This legislative body had the task of drafting a new Constitution guided by the principles of the October Revolution. Venezuelans from every corner of the country came to admire the rhetorical skills of the young politician. Venezuelans were able to listen to Caldera's speeches after Andrés Eloy Blanco, President of the National Constituent Assembly, granted Caldera's request to allow live radio broadcast of the legislative sessions. Caldera played a prominent role in this assembly. He delivered celebrated speeches on the social rights of workers, the social function of private property, agrarian reform, religious freedom, religious education, and the need for direct, popular election of state governors.