Ramón J. Velásquez (1916-2014)

/ June 24, 2014

Ram_n_J._Velasquez_Sec_diogenesRamón J. Velásquez, eminence grise of Acción Democrática, has died in Caracas at the age of 97. It’s unfortunate that Velásquez will be remembered by most for his short, ill-starred stint as accidental president following the resignation of Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1992-1993 or, alternatively – in the wake of the publication of Francisco Suniaga’s enormously successful novel, El Pasajero de Truman – for his brief role as Diógenes Escalante’s personal assistant back in the early 1940s.

Both of these are footnotes. In a better world, Velásquez would be remembered as an enormously talented contemporary historian: a prose stylist with a knack for immersing you in the feel of the past hardly matched in Venezuela’s 20th century.

Velásquez’s stunning “Confidencias imaginarias de Juan Vicente Gómez” in particular marked me deeply. Painting a vivid picture of Gómez the man, his political nose, his times, his crimes, his rebellions (and the ones he put down), his achievements and his tortured relationship with Cipriano Castro, the book deserves a much wider audience than it ever found. Today would be a fine day to pick it back up and read through it once more.

(If you can find it: scandalously, it seems to have been out of print for the last two decades.)

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27 thoughts on “Ramón J. Velásquez (1916-2014)”

          • Wow, Tovar Acuña es tremenda joyita!

            Larry Salvador Tovar Acuña (nacido en San Juan de los Morros en 1958) es un ingeniero y narcotraficante venezolano, representante del cartel de Medellín en Venezuela.

            Estudió ingeniería civil. En 1988, Tovar Acuña fue condenado a 13 años de prisión por participar como testaferro de un cartel colombiano de la droga para trasladar cocaína desde Venezuela hacia Estados Unidos.

            En 1993, cumpliendo su pena en la cárcel de El Rodeo, recibió un indulto cuando ni siquiera había sido sentenciado por los delitos que en ese momento se le atribuían. Eso generó un escándalo político que desestabilizó la presidencia interina del historiador Ramón José Velásquez. El mandatario reconoció haber firmado la gracia, pero descargó la responsabilidad de aquel episodio sobre su secretaria, María Auxiliadora Jara. Tovar Acuña salió en libertad a pesar de que la boleta de excarcelación que fue remitida por fax a la citada instalación penitenciaria, contenía un número de cédula de identidad que ni siquiera correspondía al del preso.

            Después de haber recibido el indulto huyó a Colombia, pero en octubre de 1994 fue aprehendido nuevamente por agentes del Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS) y deportado a Venezuela, donde cumplió su condena hasta 1998, cuando logró la libertad gracias a una ley que reduce las penas de los reos que estudien o realicen trabajos dirigidos durante su tiempo de reclusión.

            Sin embargo, en el año 2002, Tovar Acuña fue capturado de nuevo en Caracas señalado de participar en el tráfico de 789 kilogramos de cocaína. Por ese caso fue condenado en el 2003 a 15 años de cárcel y recluido en la Penitenciaría General de Venezuela, en San Juan de los Morros, estado Guárico.

            En mayo de 2006, fue beneficiado con libertad condicional, a pesar de que la legislación sobre drogas no permite el otorgamiento de este tipo de medidas a procesados por narcotráfico. La medida fue tomada por el juez de Ejecución del I Circuito Judicial del estado Bolívar, Alí Jiménez y anulada al día siguiente por el Tribunal Supremo de Justicia, el cual ordenó la encarcelación de Tovar Acuña.

            Desde entonces, este se encontraba prófugo de la justicia hasta que el 14 de enero de 2007 fue capturado nuevamente en el estado Aragua, por el Cuerpo de Investigaciones Científicas, Penales y Criminalísticas (CICPC).

            El 5 de enero de 2011, el CICPC detuvo en Maracay a Larry Tovar Acuña.

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            • Danke, Juan, pero coño: eres un “odiador de Wikipedia” y la usas sin decirlo :-p. Démosle crédito a esa fuente de referencia y contribuyamos con tres dólares para que se mantenga.

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              • Yo siempre les doy plata! Y no odio Wikipedia, sólo que me arrecha que no podamos armar la página de Caracas Chronicles!

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      • No. Diosdado lasted 12 hours in office. Lepage lasted 16 days. They’re gone down in history more like technicalities than presidents in the full sense of the word. Otherwise, we should also be taking into account every other person who’ve been appointed president pro tempore while the sworn-in president is away.

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  3. The story about him pardoning a drug dealer is misleading , the routine in Miraflores is for the Minister of Justice to bring the president a list of those which have been nominated for presidential pardon , the president then checks the names and strikes out those he knows dont deserve the pardon ( including known drug dealers) , then a couple of days later the official document declaring the pardon is brought to the presidents signature , he can assumme that the document brought to him only has the names he approved previously, in actual fact people inside the Justice Ministry are sometimes bribed to put back the names of those which have been taken out , Dr Velasquez was taken in by this trick and signed a pardon he did not intend to sign .

    This exact ploy was tried on CAP a few years before , except that CAP was an experienced Pol and he knew the kind of tricks that were played on unsuspecting officials , so he had his staff check again the names in the document against the names actually approved and discovered that some names taken out had been put back in and had the document modified so that no one got pardoned that didnt deserve it .

    Dr Velasquez just wasnt a sharp enough pol to know that what the minister brought him wasnt necessarily the list he had approved previously.!!

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  4. He wasn’t just a brilliant writer, but he was one of the most progressive minds in Venezuela. He led the COPRE and was an architect of the political reforms that came to be a few years later. To me, one of his biggest achievements. Without him, Venezuela would be today a much worse place.

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    • Do check your sources, man. COPRE was an utter failure. A significant contribution to the current political mess can be found in the resistance of the political establishment against implementing the list of reforms proposed by COPRE back then. COPRE was not meant to achieve local elections only —28 years late, by the way— which had to come to be due to a trickery CAP played to his own party: since he correctly foresaw a rally in support of it, he very publicly promised to make it happen as AD was going through infighting to choose their candidate for the 1988 presidential election.

      Still, Mr. Velasquez is praiseworthy in his achievements for the good of Venezuela.

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  5. Let is also be said that he was, for all I know, a kind and decent man. I’ve never heard anything but praise for him in that regard.

    The pardon of the drug dealer was more an administrative mishap and an issue with the people surrounding him. There has never been an allegation that there was some sort of pay-for-play involved with Velásquez.

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    • “Let is also be said that he was, for all I know, a kind and decent man.”

      And thus, he had no place in the prevailing venezuelan political culture, as Quico says. Even before the indulto, the whole media narrative about his presidency was that he was too placid, too “pendejo” to get anything done. Obviously what the country needed was to elect hard-case macho man (military background a plus!) to really start fixing things.

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  6. Dr Velasquez short sojourn as a provisional president only deserves a foonote in a life that was full of notable accomplishments . He was first and foremost a gifted historian whose books give us a picture of Venezuelan history as never had been attempted before , Coupled with that he had a brilliant pen and the the qualities of a true statesman of uncontestable honesty and vision.

    My own favourite work of his was the monumental ‘Caida del Liberalismo Amarillo’, portraying a time and epoch of key importance to our history.

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