Background
Gonzalo Barrios was born on 10 May, 1902 in Acarigua.
Gonzalo Barrios was born on 10 May, 1902 in Acarigua.
He had already graduated from the Central University in Caracas when he left the country in 1928.
Was the party's candidate for president in 1968. He left the country in 1928 to escape the oppression of the regime of Juan Vicente Gómez. He spent most of the next eight years in Spain, where he was closely associated with the exiled novelist Rómulo Gallegos. He also became a member of the ARDI, the exile revolutionary organization established under the leadership of Rómulo Betancourt.
Barrios returned home with Gallegos early in 1936, after Gómez death. He became one of the leaders of the Organización Venezolana (ORVE), and then of the National Democratic Party (PDN), into which ORVE merged. In January 1937 he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, but two months later was one of the PDN leaders deported by the government of President Eleazar López Contreras. Upon returning home after a year’s exile, he became head of the Discipline Committee of the still clandestine PDN. Subsequently, in 1942 he became correspondence secretary of the PDN’s legal successor. Acción Democrática (AD).
Gonzalo Barrios was a key figure in the conspiracy between AD and a group of young military men which overthrew the government of President Isaías Medina Angarita in October 1945. He became a member of the Revolutionary Governing Junta and Governor of the Federal District. In the succeeding elected government of President Rómulo Gallegos, he was Secretary of the Presidency.
With the fall of Gallegos in November 1948, Barrios was jailed and then went into exile for more than nine years. Most of the time, he was the principal leader of the AD group in Mexico.
Upon his return home after the overthrow of the Marcos Pérez Jiménez dictatorship, Gonzalo Barrios was coopted into the National Executive Com¬mittee of Acción Democrática. He was elected to Congress in 1958.
In 1968 Gonzalo Barrios actively sought his party’s nomination. The AD split; Barrios’ major opponent, Luis Beltrán Prieto Figueroa, and his followers broke away and formed Electoral Movement of the People. Gonzalo Barrios was the AD nominee, and narrowly lost to Rafael Caldera Rodriguez, candidate of the Social Christian Copei Party.
Subsequent to the 1968 election, Gonzalo Barrios became president of Acción Democrática, a position he still held in the mid-1980s.
