自己制作弹力鱼叉图片:Carlos Andrés Pérez卡洛斯安德佩雷斯

Carlos Andrés Pérez, president of Venezuela in both boom and bust, died on December 25th, aged 88
经历了国家繁荣与萧条的委内瑞拉总统卡洛斯安德烈斯佩雷斯于12月25日去世，享年88岁
Jan 6th 2011 | from PRINT EDITION

EVER since 1922, when the first gusher at Maracaibo roared up with the noise of “a thousand freight trains”, the history and destiny of Venezuela has been tied fast to oil. “Black gold” has brought highways, schools, shipyards, hydroelectric plants and the skyscrapers of Caracas. It has also brought economic collapse, political repression and thoroughgoing corruption. Not for nothing is it also known in Venezuela as the excrement of the devil.
自从1922年马拉开波的油井第一次发生井喷，以“千量货运火车”噪声大起后，委内瑞拉的历史和命运与石油联系到一起。 这个“黑色黄金”为委内瑞拉带来了公路，学校，船厂，水电站和首都加拉加斯的摩天大楼。 也带来了经济崩溃，政治镇压和彻底腐败。人们有足够理由将其成为魔鬼的粪便。

Carlos Andrés Pérez, born the very year the gusher erupted, knew all about both sides of oil. He led Venezuela through both the boom years of 1974-79, when prices had quadrupled after the Arab oil embargo, and, in a second term, through the bust of 1989-93, when they had dived so steeply that Venezuela ended up borrowing $4.5 billion from the IMF. In the late 1970s his long-time mistress, Cecilia Matos, would appear in a necklace from which hung a small, gold, oil derrick. The necklace fell out of favour, though she did not; wife and mistress still battled over Mr Pérez as he lay in his coffin, elegant as ever in suit and white silk tie.
卡洛斯安德烈斯佩雷斯，恰好出生在发生井喷那一年，他知道石油带来的利弊。 他带领委内瑞拉人民经历了1974至1979年的繁荣时期，当阿拉伯石油禁运后本国石油翻了两番，但在其第二个任期，也就是1989-93年，石油价格陡然下降，委内瑞拉最终像国际货币基金组织借了45亿美元。在70年代后期他的长期情妇，Cecilia Matos，带着一个挂着小石油井架形状的黄金项链。 尽管这条项链已失宠，但是她没有;妻子和情妇一直困扰着佩雷斯先生，直到他躺在他的棺材里，身着西装，佩戴白色真丝领带，永远是那么的优雅。

Flash, energetic, full of sound political instincts but economically challenged, Mr Pérez rode the oil boom like an old-fashioned populist caudillo. His proudest stroke was to nationalise the oil industry in 1976, buying up the foreign companies for $1 billion and signing the papers with a showy gold pen. Huge public works were started, at a cost of $53 billion: housing projects, industrial parks, a subway in Caracas and El Sistema, a music-teaching programme for the poor. Venezuela Saudita (Saudi Venezuela) seemed to be doing so well that in 1989, even with oil prices dipping, Mr Pérez invited 27 heads of state and 800 foreign dignitaries to dine on lobster and bubbly at his second inauguration.
他神采奕奕，精力充沛，充满着良好的政治本能，但经济上总具有挑战，佩雷斯先生像一个旧时代的民粹主义元首主宰着石油的繁荣。 他最值得骄傲的努力是在1976年将石油行业国有化，以10亿美元收购了所有的外国公司并用艳丽的金笔签署了文件。 他花费530亿美元用于庞大的公共工程：住房项目，工业园区，加拉加斯地铁和 El Sistema——针对穷人的音乐教学计划。Venezuela Saudita（沙特委内瑞拉）在1989年运行如此顺利。即便石油价格小幅下降佩雷斯先生仍邀请27位国家元首和800名外国政要用餐龙虾和香槟来招待他们参加他的在第二次就职典礼。  

Some policies were sensible. The newly nationalised oil industry kept the structure of the old, and production was limited to try to moderate the flood of money into a country ill-equipped to handle it. An investment fund was set up, too. But Mr Pérez never thought to pay off Venezuela’s external debt, which rose from $0.7 billion in 1974 to $6.1 billion in 1978, or to stem the flight of $35 billion in capital out of the country. A man of ambitions as big as his sideburns, Mr Peréz seemed to think the oil price would never go down.
他的有些政策是明智的。 新国有化石油产业保持了旧体制，限制石油产量以缓和资金涌入这个设备简陋的国家。也建立了投资基金。 但是，佩雷斯先生从没想过要还清委内瑞拉的外债，这些债务已从1974年的7亿美元上涨到1978年的61亿美元，或阻止350亿美元资本的抽逃。他的野心就如同他的大鬓角，佩雷斯先生似乎认为石油价格不会下降。

By 1989, the year he went begging to the IMF, this fervent socialist—a man whose first instincts in government in 1974 had been to freeze the price of arepas (Venezuelan tortillas) and to insist on an operator in every lift in Caracas—had become a reluctant Thatcherite. He raised interest rates, removed customs dues and liberated petrol prices, which promptly doubled. The result was rioting in and around Caracas in which some 400 people died, mostly shot by the national guard.
到1989年，他去乞讨国际货币基金组织放贷，这个热情的社会主义者——他在1979年政府中的才能冻结变成了arepas（委内瑞拉玉米粉圆饼）价格，他坚持在加拉加斯鼓励每一个运营商，——变成了一个不情愿的撒切尔。 他提高了利率，取消海关税和解放汽油价格（之后石油价格增加了一倍。） 其结果是加拉加斯和周边引起了骚乱，其中约有400人死亡，大部分被国民警卫队开枪射杀。

Mr Pérez’s moral authority never recovered. He made a poor salesman for his austerity programme; though it did Venezuela good in the end, the gap between rich and poor yawned as wide as ever, and many also assumed that the president was stealing. In 1993 Congress impeached him for diverting $17m of public money to a secret fund; he said it had gone to help Violeta Chamorro win the presidency of Nicaragua, but the Supreme Court nonetheless removed him from office and put him under house arrest.
佩雷斯先生的道德权威再也没有恢复过来。 他游说他的紧缩政策方案，虽然最后为委内瑞拉带来利益，富国和穷国之间的差距越来越大，许多人还认为总统窃取了国家财产。 1993年国会因其将1700万美元的公共基金转移到一个秘密基金中而弹劾了他，他说，他把钱用来帮助比奥莱塔查莫罗赢得尼加拉瓜总统，但最高法院仍然免去他的职位并软禁了他。

From coffee to petroleum
从咖啡到石油
He was noisy even then. Politics was always his life and soul. It represented his ticket out of Rubio, in the Andes, to a life of glamour, fame and ever-attentive women. But Rubio, a coffee town, also shaped his deepest political instincts. His father owned a small finca there and, when the world coffee price collapsed in the 1930s, he died of stress and despair. Young Carlos realised then the reality of Venezuelan life: because his country was underdeveloped, it could neither control the price of its resources nor run its own affairs.
即使在当时他仍然没有安静下来。 政治一直是他的生命和灵魂。 它代表了他再安第斯山脉卢比奥以外候选人名单，他过着一种充满魅力，名望的生活，有一个一直对他很体贴的女人。但是鲁比奥——一个咖啡小镇，也塑造了他最深的政治本能。 他的父亲在那里拥有一个小庄园，当世界咖啡价格在20世纪30年代狂跌后，就在绝望和压力中死去。 年轻的卡洛斯则是委内瑞拉现实生活：因为他的国家还不发达，既不能控制其资源的价格也不能管理自己的事务。

A half-hearted try at lawyering therefore didn’t work; he was too busy reading leftish books. As a teenager he joined the National Democratic Party, then the socialist Acción Democrática, then in 1945 became private secretary to Rómulo Betancourt, AD’s founder, which got him into national politics in risky opposition to a series of military rulers. For ten years he was exiled, but came back strongly, and campaigned village-to-village for the presidency like an American congressman.
踏在律师业半心半意，因此没有坚持下去，他忙于读左翼的书。在他十几岁时加入国家民主党，然后参加了社会主义民主行动，在1945年成为罗慕洛贝当古（社会主义民主行动的创始人）的私人秘书，这使他从冒险的反对党的国家政治成为一系列事件的军事统治者。 十年来，他被流放过，但是他又依然回来了，而且像竞选美国国会议员一样从一个村庄到村庄。

Once ensconced in the Miraflores palace, he determined to make his country speak for the commodity-rich but less developed world. As a member of OPEC (as he declared in an open letter to America’s president, in 1974 in the New York Times), Venezuela intended to counteract the “economic oppression” of the industrialised countries, and the “outrageously low” prices they paid. He saw himself as a voice for the South against the North, as a pillar of the Non-Aligned Movement and a supporter of any country, such as Cuba, that got up the nose of the first world.
曾经躲藏在米拉弗洛雷斯宫，他决心使他的国家成为那些资源丰富但欠发达的世界的代言人。 作为欧佩克成员国的（在1974年他在纽约时报以公开信的方式向美国总统宣布的），委内瑞拉想要抵制工业化国家的“经济压迫”及不能容忍的低价。他将自己看成是南方对北方的代言人，作为不结盟运动的支柱，支持任何像古巴一样可以惹怒发达世界的国家。

In that sense he paved the way for Hugo Chávez, the current president, who had tried to remove him in a coup in 1992, and whom he hoped would “die like a dog” before too long. Like Mr Chávez, he believed that oil gave Venezuela a passport to greatness and a mandate to annoy. He did not believe it allowed him to play quite so fast and loose with democracy.
在这个意义上说，他铺就了现任总统查韦斯的道路，后者曾试图在1992年发动政变推翻他的政权，他希望查韦斯不就以后将“像狗一样死去”。但如查韦斯一样，他认为，石油给了委内瑞拉获得强大的护照和免受骚扰的授权令。 他不相信它允许他的玩这么快，并通过民主去争夺。