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New York – Few characters in the history of the Latin American left have been touched and have reflected the evolution of the same thing over the last sixty years as Theodore Petkoff. He died yesterday in Caracas at the age of 86, after a very long trajectory crossing all the meanders of this Latin American left. He went from Castro's guerrilla warfare in Venezuela in the early 1960s to ruthless, accurate and enlightened criticism of the worst excesses of Chavismo and to the current president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, who went through a long time as a symbol of a new left. : democratic, independent of Moscow and Havana, modern and globalized.
Petkoff began his political work in the late 1940s in Caracas. Shortly after the triumph of the Cuban revolution in January 1959, and Fidel Castro's first trip to Caracas on January 23, abroad, to celebrate the first anniversary of the fall of dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, Petkoff began The Cubans and their brother Luben create a guerrilla center in the Venezuelan mountains. He soon came into conflict with the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), of which they were members and which – like almost all the communist parties in Latin America at the time – was pro-Soviet, reformist, pacifist and opposed to the Cuban theory of guerrilla focus, theorized by the young French philosopher Régis Debray, who maintained a distant but constant relationship with Petkoff during all these years. After years of struggle against the Venezuelan government, they were eventually defeated by Venezuela's president at the time and perhaps the first true social-democratic of Latin America, Rómulo Betancourt.
At that time, Venezuela was the most important intersection between two efforts: those of the Cuban Revolution for supporting a guerrilla movement and reproduced the epic of the Sierra Maestra and that of the government of United States – first from Eisenhower and especially from Kennedy – to thwart this Cuban effort by a counter-insurgency strategy, but also the Alliance for Progress and a social-democratic approach like that Betancourt.
After this defeat, several internships in prison and over the years, Teodoro Petkoff entered another dynamic, that of the peaceful struggle for the same revolution. and then for a different revolution.
In 1971, he founded with several Venezuelan colleagues the Movement for Socialism (MAS), the first of which, among other virtues, received as a donation the money received by Gabriel García Márquez for the International Prize of the novel Rómulo Gallegos and a hymn specially composed for them by Mikis Theodorakis. The MAS was the child of the eyes of the moderate Latin American democratic left, modernized for many years. Theodore was a candidate for the MAS Presidency in 1983 and 1988, but the organization did not take off. The former party of democratic action, Betancourt and Carlos Andres Perez, has never lost the base of their workers in Venezuelan unions and, beyond intellectuals and students, the MAS has marginalized.
The party closed its cycle at the end of the decade of the 80s, after the "Caracazo" and the woes of all the Venezuelan Pacific and institutional left. The MAS began to be replaced by more radical groups such as Causa Radical and by the coup attempt of a handful of young military officers led by Hugo Chávez, apparently nationalists, but actually trained directly or indirectly by Cubans.
Teodoro Petkoff was never a chavist, although in my discussions with him in the late 90s and early 20th century he showed sympathy, not for the proposals of Chavez, but for the diagnosis of the catastrophe engendered by the famous pact of Punto Fijo, which served as base to bipartism of Acción Democrática and Copei. Petkoff was Minister of Coordination and Planning from 1996 to 1999, during the last Pact government (although some do not consider it as such), that of Rafael Caldera. For a time, he became a kind of vice president. He made great efforts to update the benefactor and controller of the Venezuelan state, especially the huge oil reserves of the Orinoco belt. During my conversations with him at the time, I had the impression that he had not gotten from Caldera, an older man, the support needed to carry out all his proposals.
Petkoff became neoliberal at the end of his life for many people. I do not believe it. Both in the Caldera government and later as leader of opinion in Venezuela during the early years of Chavez – in the newspaper El Mundo and later in Tal Cual, which he founded and repressed by Chavismo – occupied a post that was not always reached, left democratic. For me, Teodoro Petkoff was someone who has fought for the same causes since the beginning of his career, in the fifties, until the end of his life, when the Nicolás government Maduro cornered Tal Cual and opened a lawsuit, with which he banned Teodoro from leaving the country.
A character of great bravery, honesty and congruence of the Latin American left is dead, which we would like to see reign throughout the region and that no one like him has incarnated.
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