Rafael Caldera

Rafael Antonio Caldera Rodríguez (24 January 1916 – 24 December 2009), twice elected the president of Venezuela, served for two five-year terms (1969–1974 and 1994–1999), becoming the longest serving democratically elected leader to govern the country in the twentieth century.

His first term marked the first peaceful transfer of power to the opposition in Venezuela's history.

Rafael Caldera Rodriguez, the son of Rafael Caldera Izaguirre and Rosa Sofía Rodríguez Rivero, was born on 24 January 1916, in San Felipe, Venezuela.

After his mother 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.

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.

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.

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.

A year later, Venezuelan President López Contreras took notice of the newspaper op-ed pieces on labor issues written by the young twenty-year-old Caldera and appointed him as deputy director of the newly created National Labor Office.

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.

In 1936, Caldera founded the National Student Union (UNE), the seed of what eventually became the Venezuelan Christian Democratic movement.

After graduating from university, Caldera founded National Action, a political movement formed to participate in municipal elections.

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.

After graduating with a degree in law and political science from Central University of Venezuela in 1939, Caldera embarked on a 70-year-long career that combined political, intellectual and academic activities.

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.

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.

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.

In the 1947 elections, at the age of 31, he ran for president for the first time and travelled around the country to spread the ideas of his newly created party.

The renowned Venezuelan novelist Rómulo Gallegos, candidate of the social democrat party AD (Democratic Action), won this election.

Caldera also ran for Congress and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the period 1948–1953.

His congressional term, however, was interrupted after Gallegos was ousted by a coup d'état on 24 November 1948.

In 1952, Caldera was elected representative to the National Constituent Assembly.

Widely acknowledged as one of the founders of Venezuela's democratic system, one of the main architects of the 1961 Constitution, and a pioneer of the Christian Democratic movement in Latin America, Caldera helped forge an unprecedented period of civilian democratic rule in a country beleaguered by a history of political violence and military caudillos.

His leadership established Venezuela's reputation as one of the more stable democracies in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century.

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.