Latinnews Archive
Latin American Weekly Report - 10 February 1994
Caldera risks military wrath by dismissing minister and high command
President Rafael Caldera ensured that his government would get off to a controversial start by announcing a few days before his 2 February inauguration that the entire military high command would be changed. He followed this up on 31 January by appointing a new-look, 28-member cabinet characterised by what he described as 'solidarity between the generations': he is 78 and his youngest minister, Ruben Creixems (justice), is 36. The list included several technocrats and few machine politicians.
The biggest shock was the decision to replace the defence minister, Vice-Admiral Radames Munozz Leon, and all six senior commanders of the armed forces. Munoz, a highly political sailor, described his treatment by Caldera as 'humiliating' and warned that the military would be split over its attitude to the new administration. Caldera has given the defence ministry to the army.
Caldera made clear his backing for the Venezuelan candidate for secretary-general of the Organisation of American States, Miguel Angel Burelli Rivas, by appointing him foreign minister. This is hardly designed to improve already tense relations with Colombia, which has President Cesar Gaviria as its own undeclared candidate. Perhaps to compensate, Pompeyo Marquez, a former guerrilla and founder of Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), has been put in charge of relations with Colombia.
Other appointments seem designed to give the government a broadly-based and non-sectarian look. For example, the interior minister, Ramon Escovar Salom, was attorney-general in Carlos Andres Perez's government, and was a minister in two previous Accion Democratica administrations.
Technocrats have been put in charge of finance (Julio Sosa Rodriguez), energy (Erwin Jose Arrieta) and education (Antonio Luis Cardenas and Guido Hernan Arroyo), and a human rights activist, Asdrubal Aguiar, is the new governor of the violence-torn federal district. He will be backed by a minister for youth, Pilarica Iribarren, one of two women in his team.
The minister of the presidency is Caldera's own son, Andres, with a team of trusted lieutenants, whose loyalty will be crucial in the absence of a solid party structure to underpin the President's programme. He has rewarded his main economic adviser, Asdrubal Baptista, 46, by making him minister for economic reform, a new post. This should reassure business leaders, as Baptista is known to be against a wholesale rolling-back of the neo-liberal reforms initiated by Perez.
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