A military dictatorship ruled Venezuela for ten years, from 1948 to 1958. After the 1948 Venezuelan coup d'état brought an end to a three-year experiment in democracy ("El Trienio Adeco"), a triumvirate of military personnel controlled the government until 1952, when it held presidential elections. These were free enough to produce results unacceptable to the government, leading them to be falsified, and to one of the three leaders, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, assuming the Presidency. His government was brought to an end by the 1958 Venezuelan coup d'état which saw the advent of democracy, with a transition government under Admiral Wolfgang Larrazábal in place until the December 1958 elections. Prior to the elections, three of the main political parties (with the notable exclusion of the Communist Party of Venezuela) signed up to the Punto Fijo Pact power-transition agreement.
Background El Trienio Adeco was a three-year period in Venezuelan history, from 1945 to 1948, under the government of the socialist Democratic Action party (Accion Democratica (AD), its adherents adecos). The party gained office via the 1945 Venezuelan coup d'état against President Isaías Medina Angarita, named "The October Revolution" on October 18, 1945, and held the first general elections in Venezuelan history. The 1947 Venezuelan general election saw Democratic Action formally elected to office, but it was removed from office shortly after in the 1948 Venezuelan coup d'état.
There was no particular incident that set off the bloodless 1948 coup, which was led by colonel Carlos Delgado Chalbaud. There was no popular opposition. This might have meant that the odds were too great or that the pardo masses had not noticed any particular improvement in their lives despite the incessant government propaganda. All prominent adecos were expelled. The other parties were allowed but muzzled.
Delgado Chalbaud (1948–1950) Venezuelan historians often say that Delgado Chalbaud was planning to restore Venezuelan democracy. If that was his intention, he did not get the chance to accomplish it. One day in November 1950, as he was being driven unescorted through a wooded part of Caracas towards the presidential palace, he was cut off by cars and kidnapped. His captors took him to an isolated house in southern Caracas. All versions of this incident are more or less agreed that someone's gun went off wounding the leader of the kidnappers, that Delgado Chalbaud was then hustled out of the car and he confronted his abductors, and that finally they shot him to death. The main kidnapper, his nephew Simon Urbina, who was bleeding badly, was soon captured and later, in the then official version, he was killed trying to flee. No one accepts this version, which is why it is widely believed that it was his political partner, Pérez Jiménez, who had Delgado Chalbaud assassinated, nevertheless some believe this is unlikely since the wife of Pérez Jiménez, Doña Flor María Chalbaud Cardona de Pérez Jiménez, was Delgado Chalbaud's cousin.https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950v02/d527
Pérez Jiménez dictatorship (1950–1958) Delgado Chalbaud had formed a triumvirate with Pérez Jiménez and Luis Felipe Llovera Páez. With his death, the remaining triumvirs chose a civilian president, Luis Germán Suárez Flamerich, who was dismissed by the military in 1952, and the ambitious Pérez Jiménez became dictator with the consent of Llovera Páez. The former majors, who had risen to colonels in the democracy, were now generals. Pérez Jiménez himself was physically not very impressive. He was short, balding, and tubby, and read speeches monotonously, although surely on the personal level he must have had some magnetism. He was a megalomaniac of much character that when a Time magazine interviewer asked him what Rome's greatest legacy was, he said, : "Its ruins", apparently wanting to give the impression that while the ruins of Rome were all that remained of its greatness, his own greatness will surpass them with his visionary building projects. In some ways, this is understandable. Pérez Jiménez, unlike most Venezuelans, received a thorough education from the military academies of Venezuela and Peru which he attended and graduated from with the highest honors.
By the time he came to power, Pérez Jiménez had developed a flair for fascist opulence, boasting about his projects aimed at making Venezuela the major power of South America. The greatest of Venezuelan writers at the time (and for a long time after that) was Arturo Uslar Pietri and he became famous on television with analytical biographies of great historical figures. Uslar Pietri had a felicitous phrase: "Sow the oil" ("Sembrar el petroleo" in Spanish), which became a national slogan meaning that the state's oil income should be productively invested. But in Venezuela "sowing the oil" implied "sowers" and the country did not have too many of these. In fact, it was the undeclared understanding that "sowing the oil" really meant "give Venezuelans employment by creating government jobs".
The other reason for Pérez Jiménez's "ruins revelation" was that what he intended to do as president, apart from becoming rich, which he did, like general Juan Vicente Gomez, with his own military and civilian cronies, was to build and build and build, and here too he was undeniably successful. It is only fair to point out here that while Gomez did become immensely rich, he never had a foreign bank account and even though Pérez Jiménez was not as rich as Gomez, all his money was sent to offshore accounts. Pérez Jiménez also had an efficient secret police, but the stories about tortures and killings were, like those about Gomez, mainly inventions by the frustrated adecos, although whoever in Venezuela tried to be active clandestinely was sure to be either imprisoned or shot if he resisted. Like Gomez, Pérez Jiménez had a theoretician, Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, who happened to be the son of Gomez's own historian and had his father's persuasions. Like his father, Laureano was also a racist which became a factor when he authored the national immigration policy. By the time Pérez Jiménez had all the power in his hands, which despite his uninspiring qualities he did manage to do, Venezuela had around five million inhabitants. Depending on which measures you apply, the country can be said to have been under-populated. If you consider, for instance, that population density is not necessarily good, then it could be argued that Venezuela was not under-populated but under-educated. Vallenilla Lanz and Pérez Jiménez's idea was to open the doors of the country to as many Europeans as wanted to come, with which they, and many non-pardo Venezuelans, believed that two flies would be killed with one swat: the country's population would grow, but not with more uneducated pardos but with Europeans who brought with them, however lowly they might have been in their own countries, a higher than average education compared to most Venezuelans. The policy backfired as the immigrants were from the exact countries that had given rise to the existence of pardos.
Up to a point, this kind of social engineering might have been defensible, but the immigrants, who came from Spain, Portugal, and Italy on the rationale that they would adapt better to Venezuela and Venezuelans would adapt better to them (than, say, to Swedes), did not emigrate from their countries to give Venezuelans lessons in civics. They came for a better income and the majority of the roughly two million who did come returned home as soon as they had made enough to live better in their own lands. This emigration peaked during the 1980s, when Venezuela's economy took a tumble. It is possible that the proportion of the white population in Venezuela might have increased slightly. Many of the emigrants did make a lot of money and chose Venezuela as their country, but as to industrializing or increasing agricultural production, their effect was not and is not noticeable; and this for the simple reason that the Venezuelan government considered that diversified industrial development was its responsibility and private citizens of any nationality—in this sense, it can be said that Venezuela is perhaps the most un-discriminatory country in the world—were given ample rights in the areas of commerce, of services, and of other ancillary activities. Despite this insidious racism, it was under Pérez Jiménez that the mythification of the Amerindian caciques, who supposedly had resisted the conquistadors everywhere in Venezuela, was given a big boost, especially when an exchange house founded by an Italian immigrant (Italcambio) brought out a series of souvenir gold coins in which each cacique was depicted with facial traits that were invented out of whole cloth by Pérez Jiménez's laureate painter, Pedro Francisco Vallenilla. Despite his rigorous Catholic upbringing, Pérez Jiménez also encouraged the underlying animism of Venezuelans when he erected in the middle of Caracas’ first speedway a statue of Maria Lionza, a sort of Amerindian goddess who sits atop a tapir and is much worshipped in a jungle sanctuary in Yaracuy in central Venezuela.
Pérez Jiménez, confident that he had done good work as dictator, scheduled elections for 1952. His official party ran against COPEI and URD, which had only managed puny showings against AD in the presidential election of 1947. When the time came to vote, Venezuela's pardos wanted their adecos back and the exiled leadership of the party let it be known that it wanted URD to win. As the results started coming in showing that AD was still the political top dog in Venezuela, Pérez Jiménez shut down the polls, and the country, and after a few days, during which he probably was making sure that he counted with the loyalty of his generals, he published results that were so lopsidedly in his favor as to seem ludicrous. Pérez Jiménez thus inaugurated himself for another five years as president, and just as he had intended from the beginning.
He went on spending on infrastructure and way beyond this to gigantic industrial, agricultural, and power-generating projects. In foreign affairs, Venezuela was a faithful ally of the American government, although servile would probably be more to the point. When the government of the socialist Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala was implementing real social reforms in a country that badly needed them, Venezuela was host to a conference of the OAS (Organization of American States) in which Guatemala was ostracized. Shortly afterwards the CIA sponsored a coup in which Arbenz was overthrown. Pérez Jiménez also changed entirely the face of Caracas with a building program such as the city had not seen since Guzman Blanco, and compared to what Pérez Jiménez built, Guzman's buildings, one of which Pérez Jiménez had cut at the nose, were dwarfs. The author of this "face lifting" was Luis Malausena, whose taste was in all to Pérez Jiménez's sense of grandeur and went from the ultra-modern to a non-descript "neo-classicism". The Caracas that one sees today is, then, the unimaginative creation of a character whom no one remembers, and no one probably will as, after he made millions upon millions, he fled the country with Pérez Jiménez, never to be seen again. Caraqueños, incidentally, have never complained about the legacy of Malausena.