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One day in July 1945, Betancourt attended a conspiratorial meeting with a group of army officers. "The loudest voice in the military group," Betancourt wrote later, "was that of the then Major Marcos Pérez Jiménez," a short, awkward man with "thick tortoise-shell glasses and a stutter." Despite widespread belief that Medina was on the road to democracy already, Betancourt conspired with Perez Jiménez, the future dictator, to overturn President Medina. By the terms of their compact, Betancourt, head of what was by then a strong, left-oriented political party, became Provisional President.
Rescue of the Sewing Machines. Once in power, Betancourt drove across Venezuela like a bulldozer. In his first five months he signed 226 decrees that authorized everything from government redemption of pawned sewing machines to the imposition of an excess-profits tax. He slashed rent and electricity rates, ordered businesses to distribute at least 10% of their yearly profits to employees and imposed the then-radical fifty-fifty formula that guaranteed Venezuela at least half the profits of the oil companies.
Like every Latin American revolutionary leader, Betancourt promised free congressional and presidential elections. And in order not to perpetuate himself in power, he also promised not to run in them. To the astonishment of the cynical, Betancourt kept both promises. In December 1947, the A.D.'s Candidate Rómulo Gallegos won the first free election in the nation's history.
Under Gallegos, the party maintained its headlong drive for reform. A.D. Congressmen railroaded measures through Congress. Whenever there was opposition, A.D. masses, usually led by left-wingers, would jam the Plaza El Silencio and scream hatred at their enemies. By the end of 1948, when rumors began circulating that A.D. was planning to replace the army with a "peasants' militia," Pérez Jiménez and his brother officers rebelled. They cut down A.D. in mid-reform, arrested Gallegos, hounded Betancourt into exile, and began a new and bloody military dictatorship.
"A Certain Arrogance." While Pérez Jiménez and his cronies got rich from graft and his cops gunned down A.D. members, Betancourt traveled and talked at length and at leisure with the democrats of the hemisphere: Puerto Rico's Governor Luis Muñoz Marin (TIME cover, June 23, 1958), President José ("Pepe") Figueres of Costa Rica, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State (under Franklin Roosevelt) Adolf A. Berle Jr. He lingered over garlicky meals in modest Manhattan restaurants, analyzed what had gone wrong. After nine years of wandering and pondering, he decided that A.D. had made "psychological errors. There was a certain arrogance, a certain intolerance with minorities. Some say we tried to do too much too fast."