"The Common Good"

The top politicians of Venezuela took to TV last week and made note of a heartening accomplishment: in the year since President Romulo Betancourt, 51, was elected, the country has for the first time in history had a functioning constitutional democracy under popularly chosen leaders and with full freedoms.

As befits a nation ruled through most of its 130 years by dictators, the transition was made with the aid of a crutch: a pre-election agreement among the major parties that whichever won would take the others into coalition government. At last week's celebration, televised from Caracas' White Palace, Betancourt, founding father of the Accion Democratica (A.D.), explained that "traditionally in Venezuelan politics the winners on reaching power enjoyed all rights and advantages, while the vanquished were left with only that curious form of political privilege known in Latin America as the 'right to conspire.' We signed a pact by which the victors promised to respect the right of the vanquished to take part in political life, and the vanquished promised to defend the right of the elected to govern."

Sitting beside Betancourt, the heads of the other coalition parties, Jovito Villalba of the Democratic Republican Union (U.R.D.) and Rafael Caldera of the Social Christian COPEI, reaffirmed the pact with such emphasis that they unconsciously revealed the strains within it. Most of the strains come from the division among the parties of Cabinet posts, state governorships and autonomous state institutes, e.g., social security. Villalba's U.R.D., for example, complained loudly that the A.D. had taken the lion's share and that the U.R.D. deserved the governorship of the federal district, including Caracas, because in the election it won three times more votes there than the A.D. (But Betancourt gave the post to a nonpartisan friend of his.)

If the strains grew so great that the crutch of coalition broke, Venezuela's new democracy would not necessarily fall, because parties in true opposition are the normal state of this form of government. But breaking the coalition would bring two dangers. One would be an opening for the Communists, who are frozen out of the coalition and kept in control by Betancourt's government. The other would be political chaos that might invite intervention from the military, which is also kept in control by Betancourt. So far, these fears influence Villalba and Caldera more than transitory resentments against Betancourt, and keep the three politicians sitting at the same table. Said Caldera: "The parties learned in the crucible of persecution the beneficial lesson that the interest of each is lost if the common good is not assured."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.