Luis Beltrán Prieto Figueroa, was a Venezuelan politician. A founder of Democratic Action and Minister of Education in its first government, he was a leader of Democratic Action after the restoration of democracy in 1958. He split from Democratic Action in 1967 when it tried to prevent his victory in district-level primary elections for the 1968 presidential race translating into Prieto Figueroa winning the nomination. He and a substantial group of supporters split from AD and founded the People's Electoral Movement, which he led until his death.
Career
After completing a doctorate in political and social sciences at the Central University of Venezuela, he became engaged in politics, and was a senator from 1936 to 1941. He was a founding member of party Acción Democrática, and Minister of Education under Rómulo Gallegos. After the 1948 coup he went into exile, working for UNESCO in Costa Rica and Honduras, after a professorship at the University of Havana. Returning from exile after the end of the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958, he was again elected senator. During this time he was Secretary General of AD, President of the Venezuelan Senate from 1962 to 1967, and President of AD. In 1967 Prieto Figueroa campaigned to be the party's presidential candidate for the 1968 Venezuelan presidential election; a Democratic Action convention was to be held in September 1967 which would choose the candidate. Previous practice had been for convention members to be chosen by a process where local party committees chose representatives for state conventions, and these chose state representatives for the national convention. However in spring 1967 the party decided to hold primary elections at local level, with district representatives to district conventions elected by the mass membership instead of party committees. The Romulo Betancourt faction supported Gonzalo Barrios, considering Prieto too far left, but Prieto won between 65 and 75% of the local primaries. In response the national party began selectively holding district conventions in areas expected to yield pro-Barrios delegates; but these too came out for Prieto, "and made his victory at the national convention virtually inevitable. The only way the was to play dirty in the rest of the nomination process, and it was these tactics that provoked the split." Prieto Figueroa split from AD over the affair along with a substantial number of his supporters, founding the People's Electoral Movement. As its candidate in the 1968 election he gained nearly 20% of the vote, coming fourth in a close election. However Prieto's subsequent electoral run, in the 1978 Venezuelan presidential election, achieved only just over 1%.
