Alfredo Peña (politician)

Alfredo Antonio Peña (Barquisimeto, Venezuela, April 13, 1944-Miami, United States, September 6, 2016) was a Venezuelan politician and journalist. Between 2000 and 2004 he served as metropolitan mayor of Caracas.

Biography

Work as a journalist

Alfredo Peña studied Journalism at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) and began his professional career in the newspaper Tribuna Popular of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV). Later he worked at the newspaper El Nacional, where he held the position of director. Without leaving his activity in the written press, he participated as host of his own television program on Venevisión titled Conversaciones con Alfredo Peña and its famous section Los peñonazos de Peña . Peña stood out for his independence and his harsh criticism of the political parties Democratic Action (AD) and COPEI.

Political career

In 1998 he supported Hugo Chávez's candidacy for the presidency. In 1999 Peña decided to leave his television program to become minister of the Secretariat of the Presidency. He was then elected a member of the Constituent Assembly, becoming the most voted constituent in the country, which drafted the 1999 Constitution of Venezuela.

In 2000 Peña ran as a candidate for the newly created Mayor's Office of Caracas (successor to the Governorate of the Federal District) by the MVR. This fact created temporary friction between the government of Hugo Chávez and the allied party Patria Para Todos (PPT), which aspired to place Aristóbulo Istúriz as a candidate. In the regional elections that year, Peña was elected mayor.

Mayor

During his administration, Peña ordered the withdrawal of the Metropolitan Police from Vargas state, despite the need to provide security to a state that had suffered serious damage from heavy rains in 1999. Peña's position was that Vargas was a separate entity of Caracas since 1998 and that the governor of Vargas, Antonio Rodríguez San Juan, had to establish his own police.^{[citation required]}

Starting in 2001, Peña began to openly criticize the management of the previous governor of the Federal District, Hernán Grüber Odremán, and the alleged militarization of political life. The so-called Plan Bratton (an attempt by Peña to modernize the Metropolitan Police) also produced several disagreements between the mayor and the Chávez government. This plan also included the hiring of American police advisors led by former New York Police Chief William J. Bratton.

In a press conference held in October 2001, Peña called on Chávez to combat crime and chaos and also expressed that Chávez should "give him lead" to the underworld and not to the media, which is why, from that moment on, he definitively broke with the Venezuelan president and became one of his fiercest critics. Because of this, Peña ended up being considered a traitor to Chávez's followers.^{[citation needed]}

Peña facilitated the demonstrations and rallies held by the opposition in Caracas in 2002 and, after the coup d'état on April 11 of that year, government supporters accused him of ordering the Metropolitan Police to attack the Chavistas during the events of Puente Llaguno. Another of the questioned aspects of his management was his order to close (on two occasions) the community television station Catia TVe. ^{[ citation needed ]}

On October 15, 2004, he announced that he would not run for reelection as mayor because he considered that the 2004 regional elections were fraudulent and, shortly after the elections, he traveled to Miami, United States, where he declared that he would not return to Venezuela < i>"until the rule of law was restored".

In 2005, the Attorney General's Office of Venezuela ordered Alfredo Peña to be prosecuted for crimes related to the deaths of civilians recorded on April 11, 2002. In 2007, Peña was accused of that crime in a Caracas court., agreeing to an arrest warrant against him and, in 2009, the Venezuelan Prosecutor's Office requested Interpol to capture him with accusations of corruption.

Death

In 2012 Peña was diagnosed with terminal cancer ^{[citation required]} and because of it, he died in Miami on September 6, 2016 at the age of 72.