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.
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.
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.
Youth, education and early achievements
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. 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. 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.
Political life
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.