Venezuela’s progressive conscience

INTERVIEWING Teodoro Petkoff, Bello has found, is a disconcerting experience. He responds to questions with point-blank answers, delivered faster than the pen can travel, from behind a bristling moustache in the clipped Spanish of the Caribbean rim. Within five minutes, this interviewer realises with mild panic, he has exhausted his mental list of questions. Mr Petkoff then suddenly shifts to a more expansive gear, and over the next hour or so provides as penetrating an analysis of his country as can be found, laced with insights gleaned from both sides of the polarised, partisan divide that separates supporters and opponents of the late Hugo Chávez.

The telegraphic summarising is the habit of a man who as a guerrilla leader knew that time might be short. As a student Mr Petkoff joined the Communist Party; intoxicated by the Cuban revolution, he led an insurgency against a democratic government; he twice escaped from prison, once by abseiling from the seventh floor of a hospital block. Having concluded that the armed struggle was “a very serious political mistake”, he founded a democratic left-wing party, stood for president in 1983 and 1988 and ended up serving as planning minister in a centrist administration that tried to salvage Venezuela’s economy from the wreckage of low oil prices in the 1990s.