For many suffering from Venezuela’s economic and humanitarian crisis, the death last week of an elder statesman, Teodoro Petkoff, at age 86, seemed yet another cause for despair.
A Venezuelan journalist wrote that he felt orphaned. Another called Mr. Petkoff, a fierce critic of the country’s autocracy, “one of the last beacons of democratic integrity.” And the secretary general of the Organization of American States lamented that Mr. Petkoff left his country “without a mandate on social commitment, political coherence and defense of democratic values.”
Mr. Petkoff would have disagreed. One of the many lessons of his legacy is that there is never a time to give up on Venezuela.
I met Teodoro, as everyone called him, 12 years ago. By that time he had earned his place in Venezuelan history many times over. A vocal member of the Venezuelan Communist Party during the dictatorship of the 1950s, then a Marxist guerrilla fighting against Venezuela’s fledgling democracy in the 1960s, by the age of 40 Teodoro had renounced armed struggle. “Only fools don’t change their minds” he said of his own about-face. With the zeal of a convert, Teodoro spent the next 45 years fighting for democracy in Venezuela.
There were many battles, many of them lost. In 1971, Teodoro broke with the Venezuelan Communist Party and founded the Movement Toward Socialism, or M.A.S. Teodoro’s dissidence resounded far beyond Venezuela: When he published a book criticizing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Pravda and Leonid Brezhnev denounced him.
Teodoro renounced Communism, but he remained the face of Venezuela’s left-wing opposition, committed to a pragmatic socialism that made M.A.S. unique among leftist parties in Latin America. It was Teodoro’s face on bright orange M.A.S. posters in the 1980s, when he twice ran for president.
One might have thought that the icon of Venezuela’s left-wing opposition would have rejoiced at the rise of Hugo Chávez, a leftist opposition candidate who surged in the polls before the 1998 presidential election. One might have thought that Teodoro would have joined some of his former guerrilla comrades in backing Mr. Chávez.
Instead, Teodoro pleaded with the M.A.S. not to endorse Mr. Chávez. His pleading flickers on a fading tape in the archive of a television station: Teodoro sweating at the party convention, imploring hundreds of party militants to see that Mr. Chávez was a populist autocrat. The crowd booed and heckled, until Teodoro shouted: “Hey, chicos! Calm down. Or are you worried that I’ll convince you to change your minds?”
He did not change their minds. The M.A.S endorsed Mr. Chávez, and Teodoro quit the party he had founded. After a full four decades as the icon of Venezuela’s left-wing opposition, when a leftist opposition finally seized power, Teodoro found himself fighting the government once again.
Had Teodoro grown weary, one would have forgiven him. But the year we met, his 57th in Venezuelan political life, Teodoro was still driving his vintage Yaris to work every day, still serving as editor of Tal Cual, the newspaper he had founded. He was still writing his incisive, mordant, antigovernment editorials, still fending off attacks from the administration of President Chávez. Perhaps more than anything else in his career, the Tal Cual editorials placed him at the center of Venezuela’s public sphere. Readers waited for them. Politicians took cues from them. The president couldn’t stand them.
From his desk, Teodoro could hear the news streaming from a small television in the adjoining office of Azucena Correa, his assistant of three decades, and whatever else he was doing, he digested the headlines at the same time. He would interrupt himself: “Oh, my god, the cardinal is denouncing Chávez!” And he jumped up to alert his staff.
Or when former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina (then a senator) criticized Mr. Chávez: “She hit it out of the park! What a home run!” He pantomimed swinging a baseball bat, watching the ball disappear over a fence.
The rhapsodic obituaries published over the past week belie the fact that Teodoro had few allies in Venezuelan politics. Conservative opponents of Mr. Chávez saw Teodoro as a barely reformed Communist. They liked him most for the moments that he considered mistakes, such as when he momentarily accepted a coup that briefly removed Mr. Chávez from power. Many Chavistas saw him as a sellout, a former comrade who had traded in his leftist bona fides for a taste of power in the 1990s, when he held a post in the cabinet of Rafael Caldera, Mr. Chávez’s predecessor.
Indeed, the government of President Nicolás Maduro has hit Tal Cual with a volley of lawsuits, one of which barred Teodoro from leaving the country and ordered him to make weekly appearances in court. He was 82 years old.
For all of these reasons, one would have forgiven Teodoro for turning to pessimism. And when I last saw him, on a rainy afternoon in 2012, I thought for a moment that he had. I asked him who among Venezuela’s young politicians might carry on his work. He looked blank. I mentioned several names, and he shook his head at each one.
Teodoro leaned back in his chair and looked away from me, a rare moment of silence in our interviews. I braced myself for a dark prophecy, for the words of a politician who would die with possibly no successors. Instead, he said, “Aparecerán,” a word that means “They will appear.” Then he said it again: “They will appear.”
Dorothy Kronick is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.