Luis Herrera Campins, 82; former lawmaker, president of Venezuela
Former Venezuelan President Luis Herrera Campins, 82, part of a generation of political leaders who helped end a decade of dictatorship and usher in democracy in the country in the 1950s, died Friday in Caracas. He had been in poor health since surgery two years ago for an abdominal aneurysm led to a kidney infection and other complications.
A lawyer and a journalist, Herrera was jailed for four months in 1952 for pro-democracy political activism during the dictatorship of Gen. Marcos Perez Jimenez, then expelled from the country.
From exile in Spain, he and other leaders of COPEI, the Christian Democratic Party, founded the newspaper Tiela, which was distributed secretly in Venezuela. Herrera returned after the dictatorship fell in 1958 and went on to serve several terms as a lawmaker and as president from 1979 to 1984.
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