Background
Gustavo Machado was born of an aristocratic family on 19 July 1898 in Caracas.
Gustavo Machado was born of an aristocratic family on 19 July 1898 in Caracas.
In high school in the upper class Catholic German School, by 1914 he was already a student leader. He suffered his first year in jail when the General Association of Students was suppressed by Juan Vicente Gómez
In 1919 he took part in an aborted civil- military plot against Gómez and fled to Bonaire.
Machado spent the next 17 years in exile in the United States, France, Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia.In 1929 Machado joined an expedition that seized control of the Dutch Island of Curasao for several days, but failed in efforts to launch an invasion of Venezuela.
Upon his return home, Machado sought to unite those who claimed to be followers of the Communist Party but did not succeed. He was one of the 43 people deported in February 1937 by the government of President Eleazar López Contreras. He again spent several years abroad. Upon his return home, he was involved in the one dissident movement within Communist ranks in which he was ever to participate, but returned to the orthodox party in 1946. He was a member of the 1946 Constituent Assembly and the Chamber of Deputies in 1948. He was Communist candidate for president in 1947.
Machado was editor of the Communists’ daily Tribuna Popular, which he continued to put out for a year and a half after overthrow of the government of President Rómulo Gallegos in November 1948. In April 1950 he was again arrested and later was deported to Mexico.
With the fall of the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship, he returned to Venezuela. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1958, he reportedly opposed his party’s recourse to guerrilla war at the end of 1961 but was jailed in September 1963, as a result of the guerrilla campaign, and stayed in jail until 1968.
Gustavo Machado continued to be active in the leadership of the Communist Party after his last release from jail. The party had a national celebration in 1978 on his eightieth birthday.