Remembering Luis Piñerúa Ordaz!

Luis Piñerúa Ordaz was a Venezuelan politician with a strong democratic socialist views and a genuine supporter of social equalities who came into politics to protect the welfare of his people and fight unjustified inequalities.  He was born in Güiria, a small town port in Sucre state, in the Northeast of Venezuela, in 1913. In 1931, he became a politician  when he joined a Venezuelan surreptitious party, founded by  a number of Venezuelan political activists exiled in Colombia, named Agrupación Revolucionaria Izquierda or ARDI, which was later renamed PDN or Partido Democrático in 1936.  In 1941, the latter was disolved into different factions when a small coterie, holding a dissenting view, spearheaded by the big sachem Rómulo Betancourt, founded a new political party which they named  Acción Democrática or AD . It needs to be said that Luis Piñerúa Ordaz was a compassionate man and a fine politician who seized an opportunity to use his political competence to help his fellow countrymen - who were at a considerable financial disadvantage to others - to neutralize their needs which were centred in discontentment and lack of material things.  However, he needed a platform to stand and deliver those in need from living in abject poverty as he envisaged  an unpropitious time to come for the have not if nothing was done for them. He took seriously their unfortunate situation and he became their advocate, publicly freighting their case on their behalf.  Indeed, he was of a very different mettle and, in all his compatriots' minds, he was a champion knight in shining armour who had reinvented the expression of no fear since he was fighting a corrupted political system which was in the hand of a cruel and spiteful dictator called Marcos Pérez Jiménez who in 1948 had masterminded a coup d'etat. Certainly, politics under a dictatorship was full of uncertainties and fraught with perils and difficulties, especially for one who was a liberal-minded individual and had a mind to complain. Nevertheless, Luis Piñerúa Ordaz was without question a courageous and determined man and when his indomitable nature and philanthropic enterprise took him to the doors of the oppressor, at the Miraflores Palace, to demand greater political accountability, openness, transparency and justice for his fellow compatriots, he made Marcos Pérez Jiménez apprehensive and for this he was charged with contumacious. Nevertheless, nothing abated his cruzading zeal and he carried on fighting for what he thought was inequitable. I met Luis Piñerúa Ordaz in 1976 in San Juan de Los Morros - Venezuela as a young lad, still in high school, when he was a presidential candidate for Accion Democratica, and I found him to be an extremely charming and intelligent man, deeply involved in politics. We talked about the Vietnam war, the Cold war and the Cuban embargo, and a lot of other things that often divided opinions. That said, I found his enthusiastic edification engaging and fulfilling since he was a bright and articulate chap with a sense of reality who had his heart in the right place.  Certainly, he was the real thing who was only silenced when he past away in February 8, 2001. Still, he was  one of those people who wished for better things and I am convinced that the country would have benefited from his leadership during the troublesome years of economic chaos in which it found itself.  In support of this claim, in all probabilities, life would have changed for the better if he had been voted into office. Such is life.

P.Figueras