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Tender Little Bull. Caracas-born Simon ("The Liberator") Bolivar was the country's first military dictator; he said that "as long as our fellow citizens do not acquire the talents and virtues which distinguish our brothers to the north, a radical democratic system, far from being good for us, will bring ruin upon us." When he died in 1830, Bolivar left the country to a long line of strongmen. In 1908 Juan Vicente Gómez, "Tyrant of the Andes," began a 27-year reign. That same year, in the poverty-ridden town of Guatire, 40 miles from Caracas, a child was born to a wholesale grocer's accountant and amateur poet named Luis Betancourt.* Pleased that his second child was a boy, the proud poet accurately sized his son up when Rómulo was only four months old:
There is much of the fighting bull
In this tender little fellow.
For he begins his life knowing
That although he smiles,
He must act as fierce as ten.
In a houseful of books, Betancourt began reading in earnest when he was eight. When he finished the sixth grade—as high as the local school went—his father moved the family to Caracas.
A Hero to Worship. At Caracas' principal high school. Betancourt studied under a young psychology teacher named Rómulo Gallegos. A brilliant writer—he later turned out the classic novel of Venezuelan backlands life, Doña Bárbara—and an inspiring teacher, Gallegos became the idol of Betancourt, as the prototype of a proud man willing to risk criticizing Dictator Gómez.
In 1922 Venezuela struck it rich. On the northeastern shore of Lake Maracaibo, a quiet little oil well called Los Barrosos No. 2 suddenly blew in and began spouting crude at the rate of 100,000 bbl. a day. In the rush that followed, oil companies paid millions of dollars for choice concessions. Providing services and equipment to the oil industry made a thin upper crust gorgeously rich, but scarcely benefited such middle-class families as the Betancourts. Rómulo went to work as a bill collector for a wholesale tobacco firm, played sand-lot soccer (right forward), entered the law school of Caracas' Central University in 1927.
There he became a leader of what he calls the "first exclusively liberal movement" in the history of Venezuela—"the Boys of '28." Some of the other "boys": Jóvito Villalba, now head of the leftist Republican Democratic Union (U.R.D.), second strongest (after Betancourt's A.D.) party in Venezuela; Gustavo Machado, now a boss of the Venezuelan Communist Party. Student Betancourt quickly saw the difference between the rule of law described in his textbooks and the dictatorial lawlessness of Venezuela.
"There was a wave of liberalism through the hemisphere," he remembers. "News filtered in to us of the university reform in Argentina, the fight in Cuba against Dictator Gerardo Machado, Guerrilla Augusto César Sandino's battle against U.S. Marines in Nicaragua, the opposition to the tyrant Augusto Leguia in Peru."