José Vicente Rangel, historical figure of the Venezuelan left, dies at 91

José Vicente Rangel, emblematic figure of the Venezuelan left, politician, presidential candidate, lawyer and journalist, vice president of Venezuela for seven years in the era of Hugo Chávez, has died in Caracas at the age of 91.

Rangel was married to the plastic artist Ana Avalos and had two children, Gisela and José Vicente, the latter a figure of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and mayor of the Sucre Municipality, east of Caracas.

Born in Caracas in 1929, in political activity from a very young age, in 1946 he enrolled as a militant in the Democratic Republican Union party, URD, founded by Jóvito Villalba, historical leader of the Venezuelan democratic cause, of whom he became political secretary.

Forced into exile with the arrival of the Marcos Pérez Jiménez dictatorship in the 1950s, Rangel lived for several years in Santiago de Chile.

He returned to Venezuela to join the resistance activities and participated in the organization of the Patriotic Board, the clandestine platform for the conquest of democracy, in 1957.

Rangel left the URD in 1963, -signing party of the Punto Fijo Pact, with which Venezuelan democracy began-, of which he was an elected deputy, as the position of the national Castroist left radicalized.

At that time he was the director of a popular political agitation newspaper called

Clarín

.

Enemy of the system, he resigned from the party in protest of the official decision to enter the coalition government chaired by Raúl Leoni, from Acción Democrática.

Henceforth, from the perspective of revolutionary nationalism, José Vicente Rangel became one of the first spokespersons for the so-called

Venezuelan way to socialism

, a current that proclaimed autonomy against Soviet influences and postulated the development of electoral strategies for the seizure of power. .

From 1965 to 1968, Rangel was a member of the Revolutionary Nationalist Integration Party, and carried out a celebrated parliamentary activity due to his denunciations of military excesses in the fight against the guerrilla foci of that time.

Part of these allegations are collected in one of his most widely read books, The

Black File

, published in 1972.

The defeat and definitive withdrawal of the guerrilla movements, in 1970, turned Rangel into one of the symbols of the Venezuelan left.

He ran twice as a candidate for the Movement for Socialism, founded by Teodoro Petkoff, a post-Castro movement that challenged the Soviet Union and defended the democratic game.

His relations with Petkoff cooled, Rangel aspired to the presidency once more, in 1983, accompanied by the Communist Party of Venezuela, La Nueva Alternativa, and the People's Electoral Movement.

The modest results obtained in all those elections, in a stable and prosperous country, politically protected by the two great parties of democracy (Democratic Action and the Christian Socialist Copei), were undermining Rangel's militant spirit.

An intellectually trained man, around 1984 he folded back his political discourse, moved away from partisan activity and increased his spectrum as a press columnist, political analyst and complaint journalist.

Rangel gets his position as a journalist defending democracy and the rule of law.

Moderate and astute, he established relations with almost the entire national country of that Venezuela and became an integral part of the democratic society of that time, as an analyst and television figure.

His program

José Vicente Hoy,

broadcast on Televen until shortly before he died, became a cult date.

The arrival of Hugo Chávez

His influence on public opinion increased in the 1990s, just as the democratic experiment was in crisis.

Especially after February 4, the day of Hugo Chávez's failed coup.

Rangel became famous for his supervisory attitude of the governments of democracy, a kind of symbol of civil society in the face of power.

Hugo Chávez amnestied, two years after that coup attempt, José Vicente Rangel and the military establish a friendship and an immediate communion of interests as soon as he entered politics, in 1994. This alliance would never know any cracks.

It is from a complaint by José Vicente Rangel that Carlos Andrés Pérez, the then president, is forced to resign, a process that today is already unanimously appreciated as an unfounded artifice.

José Vicente Rangel was one of the great political influences of Hugo Chávez, one of his first teachers and one of his main operators until his death in 2013. Connoisseur and friend of the entire mass society of the nineties, a spoiled of public opinion at that time, it is Rangel who persuades Chávez to take the electoral route to come to power, presenting himself as a candidate for the 1998 elections. From then on, Chávez became a political phenomenon that produced a long hegemony in the country.

Rangel was Chancellor, Defense Minister and Vice President between 2002 and 2007. Rangel's transition to Chavismo turned him into a kind of “black beast” of the Venezuelan opposition, part of which felt betrayed as Rangel now abjures liberal values that he had invoked in his years as a freelance journalist.

Rangel accompanied the Chavista decisions to close Radio Caracas Televisión, the country's oldest channel, to close dozens of radio stations, to harass journalists and to weaken the structure of the national private press.

Once out of government, in 2007, he continued as an advisor to Chávez and then to Nicolás Maduro, of whom he has also been a resolute defender.

After having been the prosecutor of the anti-corruption debate in Venezuela, Rangel silently contemplated the most sordid corruption cases in the years of the current government, today almost all of them unpunished.