A member of the Venezuelan Revolutionary Government Junta which first brought the Acción Democrática (AD) party to power in 1945; and president of the military junta that overthrew the AD regime three years later. His mysterious murder paved the way for the advent to power of dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez.
Background
Carlos Delgado Chalbaud was born in Caracas on 20 January 1909. Delgado Chalbaud was the son of an old caudillo, Román Delgado Chalbaud, who in 1919 failed in an attempt to overthrow Juan Vicente Gómez and spent the next seven years in one of Gómez’ dungeons.
Education
Carlos went with his mother to France and was educated in French schools, including engineering training in a military school.
Career
He accompanied his father, who had been released in 1926, in the ill-fated attempt to invade Venezuela with a revolutionary force in 1929. Román Delgado Chalbaud was killed in this invasion; Carlos returned to France.
Carlos Delgado Chalbaud went back to Venezuela after the death of Juan Vicente Gómez in December 1935 and was given a commission as captain of engineers in the Venezuelan Army by President Eleazar López Contreras. He had risen to major by 1945.
When junior officers formed the Military Patriotic Union, to conspire against President isais Medina Angarita in 1945, Delgado Chalbaud joined only a few weeks before the coup of October 18, 1945. However, he became one of the two military men in the Revolutionary Government Junta set up after the coup, serving also as minister of war. He continued as minister of war under elected President Rómulo Gallegos after February 1948. In that capacity, he allowed Major Marcos Pérez Jiménez to return home from a decorous exile, and sub¬sequently he did nothing to thwart Pérez Jiménez’ plotting against the Gallegos government.
With the downfall of Gallegos on November 24, 1948, Colonel Delgado Chalbaud insisted on being head of the new military junta. He remained in that post until he was kidnapped in broad daylight in Caracas and then murdered. Full details of the plot behind his murder have never been revealed, although the assassin was himself killed by the police.