Douglas Bravo

Douglas Ignacio Bravo Mora (11 March 1932 – 31 January 2021) was a Venezuelan politician and guerrilla fighter.

Biography A native of the village of Cabure in Falcón, he became involved in the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) at an early age, establishing a party youth group in his home village in 1946. He took a key role in trade union agitation, actively supporting strikes by oil workers in 1950 and students in 1952, being imprisoned briefly on both occasions.

Before long he became a key figure in the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN) ("Armed Forces of National Liberation"), although this put him on a collision course with the PCV, which was moving away from armed insurgency. Bravo secured the support of Fidel Castro for his activity but this was not enough and he was expelled from the Communist Party in 1967. Chávez later became the President of Venezuela through free democratic elections, which Bravo rejected for not being "revolutionary" enough.

Bravo participated in the 1992 Venezuelan coup d'état attempts, and was arrested; he was pardoned the following year.

Bravo was the leader of the Third Road Movement, which criticized the Chávez administration for its reliance on energy companies from rich industrialized countries.

He died of COVID-19 in 2021 at the age of 88, in Coro, Venezuela, during the COVID-19 pandemic in Venezuela.