Talk:Luis Beltrán Prieto Figueroa

1968 election controversy

This article needs some work. This article contains far too simplistic a treatment of the 1968 election controversy, and supplies only one source to back up the article's contentions on that subject.

This source says that the nomination process for AD involved more than winning a primary election.

This source documents the kinds of procedural efforts undertaken to ensure that delegates for Prieto were not elected by district conventions (if a convention was likely to support Prieto, the party machinery ensured that no convention was held).

Wikipedia's own History of Venezuela states "As the vote was an internal party affair the true results are not really known. It is as likely that Prieto Figueroa won as that he didn’t, but the party hierarchy claimed that Barrios had and Barrios became the official candidate."

The long and the short of it is that it is too simplistic to say that Prieto "denied the winner of its primary election" the nomination because the winner of the primary would not automatically become the nominated candidate of the AD. There is more out there to support the contention (which I think is probably accurate) that the AD snookered Prieto out of the nomination, but to have a "Did You Know?" posted to the front page of Wikipedia on the basis of one reference that doesn't tell the whole story is pretty embarrassing. Zachary Klaas (talk) 22:12, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

No, the long and the short of it is that (a) Prieto was opposed by Barrios/Betancourt faction for being too left (b) after the party decided to hold primaries to choose members of the national convention, Prieto swept them, and would have won a landslide at a properly held national nominating convention. (c) knowing this, the Betancouristas engaged in various tactics to prevent Prieto winning, leading to all kinds of inter-party warring, and ultimately provoking the split. One of your book refs is Coppedge (1994); a later page (126-7) has more detail. in sum "But the results of the district conventions only strengthened Prieto's lead and made his victory at the national convention virtually inevitable. The only way the Ins could stop the Outs was to play dirty in the rest of the nomination process, and it was these tactics that provoked the split." (pp126-7) I concede though that the original ref used makes it sound like a direct primary election of Prieto, rather than elections for nominating convention members. Rd232 ^talk 13:31, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

You're saying this as if I contest any of the points you're making. I haven't done so. Put that perspective in the article and document it. What I said was that it's too simplistic to represent this as "Prieto won a primary, therefore he was entitled to the nomination". My overview of these sources say that he probably was entitled to the nomination, but the nomination process was considerably more involved than a single primary, because it did involve these district councils. I've also seen no source to indicate that the AD wasn't following its own internal rules. Was it a right under existing party bylaws for the party councils to decide to cancel the district councils? (I agree it's undemocratic to do so because a candidate one doesn't like is winning their delegates, but was it legal under the party rules?) Also, since the split caused the AD to actually go on to lose the election in 1968, shouldn't some indication that the "Ins" didn't actually get "in" be made? After all, if the Betancouristas provoked this split, it ended up not being very smart. Zachary Klaas (talk) 15:22, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

I've revised the article to more clearly explain these issues. OK now? PS the Powell source goes into enough detail that it would surely have noted it if the party were allowed to cancel the district conventions (which they did after selectively holding some and not liking the results, which really renders any such procedural nicety moot - it was political). Rd232 ^talk 11:59, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, that does seem a lot more balanced. It also places the responsibility for the claim that he would have been the nominee squarely on the quoted source. I'm still not convinced that we know he would have been the nominee, because political parties often have rules that prevent the "choice of the people" from actually being selected by the party. (For example, the Democratic Party in the US, in that same year of 1968, nominated Hubert Humphrey as its candidate despite the fact that he had not entered a single primary. Lots of people, myself included, thought that was plenty undemocratic, and the McGovern-Fraser Commission was put together shortly after this period to create procedural reforms within the party to make it so the link between the voters and the party's selection was a lot closer than that.) Anyway, from what I read on the subject, it appeared that the AD was a singularly untransparent and elite-dominated party, and though "fighting dirty" may be a good explanation for what they did, I still wonder if it was fighting dirty but according to the misguided rules of their party. Zachary Klaas (talk) 13:20, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

OK, well thanks for your input in getting this clarified. Feel free to cast an eye over other Venezuela articles, if the topic interests you! Rd232 ^talk 17:39, 16 September 2010 (UTC)