Profile : A Political Crusader Suits Up Again : Rafael Caldera is back as Venezuela’s leader. But will he take his country into the future or into the past?

Rafael Caldera first ran for president in 1947. Harry S. Truman was in the White House, and Venezuela was an economic mess governed by corrupt and inefficient autocrats with a restless military looking over their shoulders. The 31-year-old candidate was viewed as a loose cannon of national politics, and he lost.

Time has passed, but much remains the same. Venezuela is again an economic mess, its last government was corrupt and inefficient, and the military looms ominously in the background.

The big difference is that Caldera will become president Wednesday, having defeated 17 other candidates in national elections Dec. 5. But even now Caldera, 78, is seen as a loose cannon, a crusader trying to re-create himself and his country in the image of the past.

For him, at least, it is a pretty impressive past.

Caldera was born to well-off parents in the rural community of San Felipe in 1916. He was educated in private Roman Catholic schools until attending the Central University of Venezuela, where he studied to be a lawyer. He also started a family, marrying Alicia Pietri, from an influential Caracas family, and fathering six children.

He was politically minded almost from the beginning, writing articles while in college about the need to modernize Venezuela and to create an updated labor movement. He also led a student political movement, which in combination with all his critical writings led to his arrest in 1937.

It didn’t slow him down. He learned six languages fluently, became a professor of sociology and, over his lifetime, has written or edited at least 20 books.

But it was politics that drove Caldera. He ran successfully for Congress in 1941 and in 1946 was the key figure in creating Venezuela’s first modern political party, the Committee for Independent Electoral and Political Organization, known by its Spanish acronym, COPEI.

The Venezuela of those days was a tough place politically. After he lost the presidency in 1947, the military took power. Caldera’s stringent opposition led to his arrest in 1957 and exile the next year. He returned with democracy in 1959, resumed his leadership of COPEI, running for president four more times, including a winning candidacy in 1968.

His five-year term was remarkable. In line with the exploitation of the Western Hemisphere’s largest oil reserves, Caldera followed economic theories then popular in Latin America: massive government intervention, nationalization of major industries, subsidies to a middle class he essentially created.

And in a country where politicians expect to get rich in office (two recent presidents have been charged with corruption crimes), Caldera built a reputation for honesty.

It was a golden age, but one that began to collapse at the end of his term. Venezuela began a roller-coaster ride of boom and bust according to the price of oil. By the end of the 1980s, the country was in a trough, hard-hit by low oil prices, rising debt, a government manacled by corruption and an inefficient bureaucracy.

At that time, both his party and his major opponents turned toward a free-market economy along with an opening within the political structure aimed at internal democracy. Caldera was turned out as leader of COPEI and ultimately quit the party and formed a new organization that was based almost entirely on his own personality and ideas. And that is how he ran for president last year in his sixth try.

“The campaign was a crusade on his own behalf, a very personal effort, to convince the country and the world that he was the only one to save Venezuela from the clutches of degrading moral and economic policies,” said a diplomat who has served here for several years.

Even without a real party or permanent organization, the diplomat said, Caldera won because “he showed a tremendous personal display of vitality, of energy and political judgment.”

The campaign stifled rumors that he is too old, even senile, for the job. Aides say he wrote his own speeches, never canceled a campaign appearance and was always in control. “It is amazing,” said another diplomat who has dealt with Caldera for many years. “He never seemed tired and he never was distracted. . . . I don’t like his policies, but if anyone can make them work, it is Caldera.”

A Venezuelan attorney who served in Caldera’s first presidency remarked: “He always was an autocrat, and he remains one. In 1968 (when he was previously elected) he needed a party, but it was one he founded, so it did what he wanted.

“Look at this campaign. When his party (COPEI) rejected him, he rejected them and ran on his own without compromise. He told anyone who agreed to support him they did it on their own, that they would owe him and not the other way around. He made sure they knew there would be no electoral spoils.”

Can it work? It is unlikely, according to most authorities. Caldera wants to reverse many of the free-market policies put in place over the last five years, including nullification of a national sales tax, privatization of industries, cuts in subsidies that keep gasoline prices at 20 cents a gallon and a renegotiation of the country’s massive external debt.

All of this will require congressional approval, again an unlikely proposition given that among Venezuela’s legislative blocs, Caldera’s is the smallest and most fractured.

“Caldera is a powerful man,” one former ally said, “and he is counting on the public demand for change. But he was blinded by his own power before, and it kept him from keeping up with the times. On the other hand, I don’t discount him. He has never given in before, and he won’t now.”

Biography

* Name: Rafael Caldera

* Title: President-elect of Venezuela.

* Age: 78

* Personal: Born in San Felipe, Yaracuy, Venezuela. He has been a lawyer, university professor, author and politician. Elected to Congress in 1941 and as president in 1968 and 1993. Has lost four other campaigns for president. Married to Alicia Pietri. Six children: Mireya, Rafael Tomas, Juan Jose, Alicia Helena, Cecilia and Andres.

* Quote: “We have before us a future of hard work, but also a future of hope, those years in which to change the course of politics in Venezuela, ir order to reconstruct the country on a moral, social and material order that will deepen democracy and relaunch the process of growth.”