Revolution as a Latin American Fetish: The Life and Adventures of Teodoro Petkoff
A gift of the Gods for Venezuela's revolution
The revolution back then was a kind of personal adventure, with an air of romanticism. We lived the armed struggle very intensely…
I was pondering what episode of Venezuelan history could be a good subject for me to write about, when I realized that maybe I should not write about something but about someone, and that someone should be the famous Venezuelan revolutionary Teodoro Petkoff.
Petkoff was the son of Jewish European parents, the Bulgarian Petko Petkoff and the Polish Ashkenazi Ida Maleç1. They met while studying in then Czechoslovakia, where Petko studied chemistry and Ida studied medicine, though Petko's presence in Brno was due to his fleeing Bulgaria in the aftermath of the failed 1923 revolution2, in which he took part.
As a refugee in a foreign land and with no chance of safely returning to Bulgaria in the short term, Petko and Ida must have contemplated the possibility of emigrating to a country where they could settle indefinitely. While temporarily residing in Paris, where Ida was pursuing her postgraduate studies, and with the help of some Bulgarian friends who had migrated to South America, they found out about this beautiful and prosperous country called Venezuela. Taking a chance, they decided to try their luck in this new land.
Upon their arrival in Venezuela in 1927, Petko and Ida encountered the usual challenges most immigrants face when trying to secure a job and settle into their new life. However, their fortunes improved markedly when Ida was hired in 1928 as the medical doctor3 for Central Azucarero Venezuela, a sugar refinery in the small town of Batey. Petko was also promptly hired as a chemical engineer for the refinery and the couple settled in Batey, where four years later their son Teodoro was born.
The Petkoff family flourished in Batey and continued to grow with the arrival of twins Luben and Mirko, born in 1933. But the moment young Teodoro reached school age Ida and Petko - both exceptionally educated by Venezuelan standards - decided it was time to relocate to the capital, Caracas, to give their children better educational opportunities.
Once in Caracas, Petko initially worked for the Venezuelan Ministry of Development for a while before attempting to establish a chemical factory that would produce ink and printing materials. However, the onset of the Second World War made importing the necessary machinery impossible, so Petko finally settled on opening a printing shop.
Petko’s venture was not only a prosperous business during the 1940s and 1950s but also became a family-run enterprise, with Luben working as a typographer and Mirko working as a salesman. This might also be related to the fact that, unlike Teodoro, brothers Luben and Mirko didn’t display any academic inclinations, and per Teodoro’s account they were pretty restless young men:
Luben was the quite one while Mirko was a rooster, a fighting rooster. People said: There goes Luben plotting the next mischief so Mirko can make it. They were a menace. The true scourge of the neighborhood. They were arrested often, and not due to political reasons. When one of them was in prison, the other one would visit in order to supplant him until the next afternoon, when they would repeat this routine. If it was a 15-day prison sentence, each one would do half.
Teodoro was much more academically gifted than his younger brothers, after all it was him who became Venezuelan Minister of Planning a few decades later, and this despite a rather eventful academic life.
In the streets
A few years ago I used to interview job candidates for the engineering company I worked for, and one of the key aspects I always made sure to check in every resume I read was that the chronology of the resume made sense. Gaps in employment or education history raised a red flag, and the candidate better have a good explanation for any missing years.
Let’s see, Teodoro Petkoff was born in January 1932, began studying medicine at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) in Caracas in 1949, at the tender age of 17, and graduated as an economics major in 19614. That’s a total of 13 years to study two very different careers5. Something is off. As it turns out, Petkoff was very busy6:
When I began my studies of medicine, starting in 1949 at the Universidad Central of Caracas, I remained a member of the Communist Youth and was required to be politically active in the faculty of medicine. But my main focus of activity was in the streets.
In fact, Petkoff was so active in the streets that he got himself arrested on three separate occasions during the 1950s Pérez Jiménez dictatorship, an era marked by a swift surge in oil wealth and the rapid social and economic transformations that accompanied it. But his juggling of student life and revolutionary life eventually paid off in 1960, after the fall of the dictatorship, when he emerged victorious in the election for president of the student union of the faculty of economy at UCV.
His time as union president was after the fall of the Marcos Pérez Jiménez’s dictatorship, when the new democratically elected Rómulo Betancourt government allowed greater political participation. And apparently Petkoff would like to think that he contributed to Pérez Jiménez’s downfall.
At the time of the general strike of January 21, 1958, which overthrew the dictatorship, I was deeply involved in organizing the workers of the Los Cortijos neighborhood for street disorder, speaking at the factory gates and being chased by the police. On January 21 there was a large popular demonstration in the Plaza de El Silencio, and Luben and I went to see what was happening. There were fights in the streets all day. We didn't have weapons in those days, but we burned buses in the streets, and turned them into barricades.
Here's a timeline highlighting some of the major events in Venezuela's history to provide a broader perspective on the country's 20th-century developments and events mentioned that I’ve mentioned earlier:
Down with democracy
The new democratic regime did not please Petkoff. In his own words:
The failure of our campaign to stop the 1963 election had produced very important changes, both in the country as a whole and in our movement. Perhaps our biggest mistake of this period was trying to stop the elections, instead of participating in them.
The objective was to stop democratic elections and bring about a revolution by any means necessary.
The leadership of the party throughout this period was wrong in not understanding the ways of revolutionary war in the conditions of Venezuela. There was no dictatorial regime like the right-wing military dictatorships in other parts of Latin America, nor a colonial regime like in Algeria or Vietnam, but rather an electoral democracy that in Venezuela was something new…At that time, a transportation strike began in the state of Táchira, which caused uprisings throughout Venezuela and in a few days paralyzed the entire country. On the first day of the riots in Caracas there were about 18 deaths. That was the only moment in which we were about to start a much larger insurrectionary process. The only thing missing was the participation of a part of the army in the revolt. …This section of the Armed Forces existed and was willing to join the revolt.
Petkoff doesn’t seem to acknowledge any contradiction in maligning the supposed prevalence of right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America during the 1960s, while admitting the recruitment of officers from the Venezuelan Armed Forces to partake in a left-wing coup that would propel him and his fellow revolutionaries into power.
This is perfectly understandable in the context of Venezuela in the 1950s and 1960s. The general strike that toppled the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship was preceded by a failed coup attempt on January 1, 1958, led by left-wing Colonel Hugo Trejo. After the general strike had weakened the Pérez Jiménez regime, other left-wing officers led by Admiral Wolfgang Larrazábal decided to form a Junta, which requested and ultimately secured Pérez Jiménez's resignation.
Larrazábal went on to preside over the Junta during most of 1958, using his position to send weapons to Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries in Cuba. He eventually resigned in order to compete in the 1958 presidential election, with the support of the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) and the left-leaning URD party.
Pérez Jiménez for his part had first entered politics by taking part in the coup that established the 1945-48 revolutionary junta lead by Betancourt - yes, the same Betancourt - and subsequently lead the 1948 coup that put an end to that first revolutionary government of Betancourt7.
Military coups were common during those years, almost all of them from the left, and Petkoff was well aware of the fact that the Venezuelan military harbored a significant number of left-wing mid-level officers, some actively plotting the next coup:
This section of the Armed Forces existed and was willing to join the revolt, but subsequently lost strength through the futile naval uprisings at Carúpano and Puerto Cabello and other isolated uprisings. But in January 1962, the strength of the left in the Armed Forces was largely intact in La Guaira, Carúpano, Puerto Cabello and Caracas; and we were mostly in good shape due to the type of units commanded by leftist officers. We had groups in Caracas, the Marine Corps in La Guaira, and the bases in Carúpano and Puerto Cabello. If a military revolt had occurred at that time (January 1962), the fate of the country could have been different. So these units could have revolted, but they did not. We did everything we could to induce these military bases to rebel in January 1962.
The military uprisings in Carúpano and Puerto Cabello, mentioned by Petkoff, were not small affairs. In Carúpano, the rebellion resulted in 56 deaths, while Puerto Cabello witnessed the loss of approximately 400 lives.
Following these military insurrections, supported by members of the Communist Party and the MIR movement8, the Betancourt government reacted by banning both the PCV and MIR and issued warrant orders for several communist leaders, including Petkoff.
Going to the mountains
In April 1962, Petkoff and fellow revolutionary Douglas Bravo, both in hiding, decide to take the fight to the countryside and head for the mountains of Falcón State in Western Venezuela to form an initial group of rural guerrillas, intended to be the first of many. Bravo was a local big man and failed law student with considerable influence in the area. Their goal was to overthrow the legitimate government of Betancourt, or that of its democratically elected successor, Raúl Leoni, by instigating a rural based uprising in the manner of the Cuban revolution:
I knew the guerrillas from the states of Lara and Trujillo very well. In Trujillo, where my brother Luben was fighting, the guerrilla was composed mainly of peasants from the Boconó mountains…Falcón's guerrillas were organized in the context of an old dispute between the Bravo and Hernández clans in those mountains.
Bravo was not the only local big man in the Falcón mountains.
Douglas Bravo was mistakenly considered something of a coward, because Douglas's father was murdered by a member of the Hernandez clan, and in the best mountain tradition, he should have killed a Hernandez in revenge. But Douglas was interested in other things, in politics, so he went to Caracas to look for another kind of life. He later regained his prestige in Falcón when he became a guerrilla.
If your manliness is questioned by the local community due to your failure to fulfill a vendetta by taking a life, you can always get your manly reputation back by targeting and killing soldiers and policemen. Good to know.
Regarding how they formed and organized the initial guerrilla group:
In the Falcón mountains we were able to build our guerrilla base with the help of an old family of landowners who had their own retinue of serfs, squatters and servants. Our first point of arrival was a mountainous area north of Pueblo Nuevo, a town of the Bravo clan, near one of their haciendas called Los Evangelios. We were able to incorporate the Bravo’s farmers who work the land. In Falcón we established the guerrilla based on this type of political-family relations.
Large landowners, serfs, servants, farmers who work the land. That’s an interesting social structure to base a rural guerrilla on.
Besides Petkoff and Bravo the other main leaders of the Falcón guerrilla were a kidnapper and murderer from another one of the local big families9, a deserter captain from the army10, and a lawyer from another local big family (Hipólito Acosta).
They led a colorful group of guerrillas formed by students, peasants and a few enigmatic characters:
For example, there was a man who had recently killed in a typical Falcón State dispute. He was a kind of professional assassin, very brave and a good marksman, who joined the guerrillas and then left and had an incredible conversion. He became an evangelist, a shepherd of souls, a super peaceful man who was recently murdered from behind in one of those old vendettas. He had joined the guerrilla because he was a friend of the Bravos, and because of the rebellious tradition of the Sierra.
The guerrilla movement ultimately failed, as the Venezuelan army hunted down most of the insurgents. Yet Petkoff found a glimmer of success in that his Falcón State group managed to hold out longer, an accomplishment he attributes to a more selective recruitment policy.
Seeing the failure of the rural guerrillas Petkoff returned to Caracas to try his hand at urban guerrilla:
We planned and executed operations such as the kidnapping of the Argentine-Spanish soccer star Alfredo Di Stéfano, the hijacking of the steamship Anzoátegui... the fire at the Good Year tire factory, in the middle of a densely populated area, terrified the population...During the period some police officers were murdered in cold blood.11
Petkoff was finally captured in March 1963, only to escape in August of the same year. He was recaptured again in June 1964, only to escape once more in February 1967.
His time in jail apparently gave him the opportunity to ponder the possible need for a change of course in his struggle, and in 1966 he was involved in a very public dispute over the strategy of the PCV with other prominent members of the party, including Douglas Bravo.
Meanwhile his brother Luben, who had been captured in 1962 while fighting in the rural guerrilla group of Yaracuy State and subsequently escaped prison12 in September 1963, distanced himself from his older brother by advocating for the continuation of the fight through any means. In July 1966, he returned to Venezuela to resume the revolutionary fight - after having spent some time in China, Czechoslovakia and Cuba - accompanied by a Cuban contingent led by Arnaldo Ochoa Sánchez13.
Despite the Cuban support this new effort also failed to succeed, and Luben, like his elder brother Teodoro, eventually laid down arms14.
Not only did the elder Petkoff change his stance on using violence to achieve the PCV's goals, but he also caused an acrimonious split in the party when he published a book in 1969 condemning the recent Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
In December 1970, Petkoff and those who agreed with him left the Venezuelan Communist Party to found the new Movement Towards Socialism Party (MAS) with the aim of participating in the 1973 general election. Although the MAS presidential candidate, José Vicente Rangel, only garnered 4.26% of the votes, the party managed to elect two senators and nine deputies, one of whom was Teodoro Petkoff.
A new kind of revolution
The transition of the Petkoff brothers and other revolutionaries to electoral politics - of the not violence-backed variety - was facilitated by Venezuelan President Rafael Caldera's (1969-1974) conciliatory policy. This policy included the legalization of the PCV and MIR parties and the issuance of pardons for several revolutionaries, including Luben Petkoff, who was released from jail on July 1973.
The MAS and Petkoff consistently participated in elections during the 1970s and 1980s but were unable to secure a victory. During this period, the party's electoral results mostly fell below the 10% threshold.
Petkoff was the presidential candidate for the MAS in the 1983 and 1988 elections, following a split between José Vicente Rangel and the majority of MAS supporters. In the 1983 election, Petkoff garnered 4.17% of the votes. His performance declined in the 1988 election, where he received only 2.17% of the votes.
By the 1990s, rapid demographic growth and lower oil prices had once again dramatically transformed the social and economic landscape of Venezuela. Gone were the days of the 1960s and 1970s high oil price bonanza, and the country's population had surged from around 13 to 14 million in the mid-1970s to over 20 million by the early 1990s. That meant significantly fewer petrodollars to please many more Venezuelans.
Even Petkoff, the seasoned revolutionary, could not ignore the signs of the impending storm15:
This means that current levels of per capita public spending cannot be maintained by a wasteful state that employs a colossal and unproductive bureaucracy just to alleviate the possibility of social disorder. Surely two-thirds of Venezuela's public employees are unnecessary, a form of disguised unemployment absorbed by the Government to calm social unrest. Two-thirds of Venezuela's public budget comes from oil revenues, and much depends on the state's ability to employ people and redistribute this wealth.
Eventually, it was Carlos Andrés Pérez, the victor of the 1988 presidential election, who was forced to acknowledge that money does grow inside oil wells but not on trees. As a result, he initiated an economic program focused on austerity, which included the reduction of fuel subsidies and a thirty percent increase in public transportation fares.
A few days following the announcement of these new measures, all hell broke loose in Venezuela:
Larger protests and rioting began on the morning of 27 February 1989 in Guarenas, a town in Miranda State about 30 kilometres (19 mi) east of Caracas, due to the increase in public transportation prices… rioting quickly spread to the capital and other towns across the country… Students began to build barricades, which blocked the main thoroughfares in Caracas, and students of the Central University of Venezuela began to organize large protests against Pérez's new policies… reports emerged that the upper-tier of Metropolitan Police–comprising a force meant for military action– were ordered to respond to protests with force… Through the night, some working class areas participated in parties with alcohol looted earlier in the day… Some groups of troops allowed organized thefts to occur, letting people enter shops and take only essential items… Middle-class citizens responded to the protests by creating their own self-defense groups… Following the crackdown by authorities, gunfights between radical groups and the army began on 1 March… By nightfall, militants in Zona Central who had been clashing with troops, began to run out of ammunition…Rioters destroyed properties indiscriminately, with no motives related to initial protests, and many had to line up at government food distribution centers since markets were destroyed by rioters.
In the aftermath of the rioting and looting, Pérez's party emerged victorious in the Venezuelan regional election of December 1989, garnering 39.74% of the vote. Meanwhile, the MAS party, in a partial coalition with the COPEI (Christian Democratic) party, managed to elect one governor and secure 17.78% of the vote - hardly an electoral revolution.
As is widely known, this didn't deter a handful of left-leaning mid-level officers from attempting two coups during Pérez’s rule, in February and November of 1992. The first one led by Hugo Chávez among others.
Following an impeachment process that ousted Pérez from the presidency, the MAS party finally secured a significant victory when COPEI's former leader, Rafael Caldera, reclaimed the presidency in the 1993 general election, forming a coalition with the MAS. Petkoff was now part of the government.
The old revolutionary now became Minister of the Central Office of Coordination and Planning, likely due to his credentials as a graduate in economics16.
Let's take a look at an assessment of Petkoff, the traitor, and his time as a minister, as provided by marxist.com:
The appointment came at a time when the Caldera government was besieged by economic crisis and needed a sharp turn to the right in its economic policies. Petkoff was the ideal candidate to carry out that program, covering the sale of the country to private and multinational interests…The MAS participation in the Caldera government was very controversial within the party, but Petkoff managed to hold the line. ‘He became the most pragmatic of planning ministers in the 1990s, deftly negotiating a structural adjustment programme with the IMF,’ says the Financial Times obituary. What they mean by ‘pragmatic’ is pro-capitalist. Petkoff was responsible for a package of privatisations of state owned companies, cuts in social spending, increase in taxes, making it easier for bosses to sack workers, etc.
Despite the malignement of Caldera’s and Petkoff’s sound economic policies17 by marxist.com, it raises one valid point: the party was beginning to show signs of fracture.
The MAS's 1997 internal election led to a shift in the party's leadership, as those opposed to Petkoff gained control. Later on, the party's new leadership decided to support coup maker Hugo Chávez in the 1998 presidential election, prompting Teodoro Petkoff to leave the political movement that had been his home for nearly three decades.
Now that someone from the left had grabbed power and finally managed to effectively neutralize any opposition18, Petkoff’s role in the Venezuelan political landscape was confined to criticizing the Chávez regime and attempting to form a united front against it, while receiving praise from the New York Times and other prestigious establishments for his new found place as a defender of democracy:
“The best president Venezuela never had” said the Financial Times. “His struggle for freedom of expression and defense of human rights will never be forgotten,” cried Luis Almagro, general secretary of the OAS, conveniently glossing over the fact that Petkoff cheered on the undemocratic coup against president Chavez in April 2002 from the frontpage of his newspaper TalCual (“Chau Hugo” was the headline). The same disregard for the facts was shown by Dorothy Kronick, who in the New York Times described the deceased as “a restless defender of democratic values”. “A giant of Venezuela's politics” gloated the Associated Press piece on his death.
Teodoro Petkoff passed away in October 2018. I could say that an important chapter of Venezuela’s history, or even Latin American history, came to a close with his death. I could also say that he exemplified the evolution of a nation, transitioning from one where violence was an accepted means to attain power to a more peaceful society that rejects violence as a political tool.
But I’m not going to say any of those things.
He’s more of a study in the frivolity of ideology. It illustrates how individuals and societies can justify violence, theft, and deceit as long as there’s a convincing layer of bullshit to wrap it all up. And how a society that swallows bullshit is more susceptible to being preyed on.
Violence is still a thing in Venezuela. Government capture is still a thing in Venezuela. Little has changed in the last two centuries.
My primary source for Petkoff’s early years is this: https://elestimulo.com/climax/semblanza/2018-11-06/teodoro-petkoff-nacio-bajo-el-sol-de-el-batey/
It’s hard to know what was the role of Petko in the revolution and if he actually took part in any meaningful action. The older Petkoff was a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party, but the party opted out of the June 1923 rebellion hoping that the repression against the stronger BPAU party would weaken them, potentially allowing the communists to seize power later. Only after Moscow ordered the BCP to organize a rebellion in September did communists suffer repression from the Bulgarian government. Sources: https://web.archive.org/web/20101011003946/http://www.bulgaria-embassy.org/History_of_Bulgaria.htm#POST%20-%20WAR%20CRISIS%201918-1925; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1923_Bulgarian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat#Aftermath
Ida was quite the character apparently. She spoke 11 languages and was the first woman authorized to practice medicine in Venezuela, before any local Venezuelan woman.
I’m not 100% certain of this as Petkoff mentions being president of the student union during 1960 and 1961 “when I was close to graduating“. Source: https://tropicoabsoluto.com/2021/01/31/teodoro-petkoff-la-crisis-de-un-revolucionario-profesional-parte-i-anos-de-insurreccion/
I once interviewed a candidate who dropped his initial major just prior to completing it, opting to pivot towards an engineering degree. I decided to hire him and he turned out to be one of the best engineers I've had the pleasure of working with.
I’ll be quoting extensively from a series of interviews that Teodoro Petkoff gave to journalist Norman Gall, beginning in 1971. This is the first such quote.
A charitable interpretation of the 1948 coup could be that it was neither right-wing nor left-wing but rather a response to the growing power and authoritarianism of the Acción Democrática party (Betancourt's party). However, the leader of the triumvirate that orchestrated the coup and subsequently ruled Venezuela, Colonel Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, was known for his communist sympathies.
Not to be confused with the Chilean MIR and Peruvian MIR. Maybe a good subject for a future post.
His name was Domingo Urbina. He had recently escaped - yes, another prison escape - from a Caracas prison where he was serving time for the 1950 kidnapping and murder of Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, who was the provisional president at the time (see footnote 4). He eventually switched sides and joined the Armed Forces Intelligence Service (SIFA), becoming infamous among his former comrades for his efficiency in suppressing the Falcón guerrilla. Urbina died in an ambush in the Falcón mountains in 1985, likely at the hands of bandits.
His name was Elías Manuit. In the words of Petkoff: “[He] was stationed at the Táchira military base when the Carúpano revolt occurred. He was a young man, emotional, romantic, composer of songs and poems, but very tough. At the time of the Carúpano uprising, he abandoned his army post in Táchira and entered the party headquarters in Caracas with two machine guns, saying: ‘I resigned from the army. I want to go to a guerrilla camp. You never told me anything about this revolt!’ There was no way to convince him not to do it, so they sent him to Falcón.”. You can read a very complete hagiography of Manuitt here: https://sanjuandelosmorros.blogspot.com/2010/02/elias-manuitt-camero-notas-biograficas.html
Petkoff made no mention of the 1969 kidnapping of TV presenter Renny Ottolina's two young daughters during his interview with Norman Gall. He had renounced the armed struggle by that time, yet many of his former comrades continued to find it enjoyable and persisted in their actions. Carlos Lanz, the leader of the kidnapper's cell, not only participated in the 1976 abduction of American businessman William Frank Niehous, but ironically, after reaching the summit of his revolutionary career as president of Venezuelan state-owned aluminium producer Alcasa, he was kidnapped and killed by hitmen hired by his own wife.
If you are wondering whether escaping from a Venezuelan prison was just too easy, consider this quote from Petkoff, describing his 1963 escape from a heavily guarded hospital where he had been transferred: “I remember on the sixth floor there were some army officers on the window landing. I guess when they saw my feet dangling in front of them they were very surprised. When I got out in front of their window we looked at each other. So I put my finger over my mouth and said, ‘Shhh!’ They nodded yes”. His reflection on this: “No one likes to be a snitch, and I suppose they thought it ungentlemanly to rat out a prisoner who was trying to escape.“
After a long career leading Cuban foreign interventions, Ochoa Sánchez's life took a dramatic turn in 1989. He was accused by Cuban authorities of using his power and influence in Cuba to facilitate the trafficking of cocaine, diamonds, and ivory. He was found guilty and shot in Havana.
Luben seems to be even more hated than his older brother by the revolutionary loyalists, those who did not renounce the armed struggle and who incidentally mostly sided with Hugo Chávez when the coup-making colonel became the big man of Venezuela. A quick internet search will yield articles accusing Luben of being a murderer, collaborating with Henry Kissinger, drug trafficking, being a traitor, and most damning of all, making money.
Petkoff wrote this before 1983, at least a decade before the crisis became acute.
Based on my personal experience, I’m inclined to believe he barely knew any economics by the 1970s. In Latin America, left-wing student leaders often view their studies as a means to participate in university politics rather than as preparation for their future job life. Despite his flaws Teodoro Petkoff was highly intelligent, and I believe he acquired the necessary economics knowledge while he was in parliament.
Poverty decreased from 54,7% to 50%, GDP increased more than 8%, and inflation decreased. These achievements were noteworthy given the unfavorable external environment of low oil prices.
It took some time for Chávez to reach that point. By the time of the April 2002 attempted coup, he clearly did not have complete control over the country yet.