The news just came out over the tweeter in the last hour or so. Here’s the first official announcement, courtesy of Panorama:
Translation mine.Obviously, this is the Reader’s Digest condensed version of Pérez. The real one is considerably longer and more sordid. Cecilia Matos, for starters, was Pérez’s mistress and the reason for his divorce. And believe it or not, she is the LEAST sordid chapter of his life. Here’s the MOST sordid one…the Caracazo, a military/police massacre of random, poor Venezuelans, ordered from the top…by the newly second-term president, Carlos Andrés Pérez, in late February and early March of 1989:Video in Spanish, in two parts; click through for the second.Pérez was not solely responsible for all the crime and death, but he was at the head of the very corrupt AD government that decided to follow, to the letter, the IMF’s disastrous “shock therapy” package. He was not a president so much as a tame dictator; he reversed his campaign promises almost as soon as he had taken office. In so doing, he lost whatever democratic credibility he still had. The results were catastrophic for Venezuela’s majority poor, whose wages did not keep step with the sudden inflation in the cost of living that a “free market” inevitably brings. The price of gasoline rose, and with it, bus fares more than doubled. Prices shot up as storefronts closed; there was no actual shortage of goods, but the store owners were hoarding them in order to jack up the prices by claiming shortages. Angry crowds refused to buy that–literally. They set the buses on fire and broke into the shuttered shops, taking whatever they could get their hands on. Barricades made of old tires and garbage burned in the streets. Some waved the flag and sang the national anthem, a graphic reminder that this was not mere looting, it was a nation trying to reclaim its dignity in a spontaneous, unorganized outburst. But Pérez, having set a disaster in motion by going back on his campaign promises, did not revert meekly to democracy. To do so would have meant losing the IMF cash with which he intended to line his own pockets and those of his mistress and cronies. So he chose another tyrannical, top-down “solution”: He sent the army out to fire on the citizens, indiscriminately, in the poor neighborhoods where the protests raged for days on end. Crank up the sound on that. The Bersuit song is an angry and very fitting soundtrack. “Here comes the explosion/Here comes the explosion/Of my guitar/And of your government/As well.”The only thing that saddens me about this death is that this murderer, this dictator, never did any prison time in his life for the thousands of violent deaths on his watch. He was impeached in 1993 for misuse of public funds, a weak charge considering the death toll of his reign–one approaching that of Augusto Pinochet, according to unofficial figures. The Caracazo is widely believed to have killed as many people in one week as died at the hands of fascist thugs during Pinochet’s entire reign. Carlos Andrés Pérez was actually something worse than Pinochet–he was utterly dishonest about his antidemocratic stance, whereas at least the Chilean dictator made no bones about his own. And rather than do jail time, Pérez fucked off to Miami to enjoy the good life with his mistress…and call for a true democrat, Chávez, to die “like a dog” at regular intervals. Classy, huh?Here’s the fun part, though: Pérez was waiting for Venezuela to call him home to be president again. That call never came. The only call came from Hades, where one might devoutly hope this sickening old bastard finds justice at last.Ashes to ashes; dust to dust; shit to the shitpile. Goodbye, Carlos Andrés Pérez…pathological liar, thief and murderer. You won’t be missed.Former Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations, Diego Arria, posted a few minutes ago on his Twitter account that the former president of Venezuela, Carlos Andrés Pérez, died on Saturday, December 25, aged 88, in Miami.Carlos Andrés Pérez was president of Venezuela for two terms (1974-1979 and 1989-1993) as head of the Acción Democrática (Democratic Action) party.He lived with his family in Miami, and had withdrawn from public life after a stroke.The ex-president was born in Rubio, in the state of Táchira, on October 27, 1922.He was married in 1948 to his cousin, Blanca Rodríguez. They had six children: Sonia, Thaís, Martha, Carlos Manuel, María de los Angeles, and Carolina.After his second term in office, Pérez divorced his wife and continued to live with his secretary, Cecilia Matos.
