Teodoro Petkoff

Teodoro Petkoff Malec was a Venezuelan politician, economist and journalist. One of Venezuela's most prominent politicians on the left, Petkoff began as a communist but founded the democratic socialist Movement Toward Socialism party after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Petkoff was elected as senator and ran for the presidency twice in the 1980s, being defeated both times. As Minister of Planning, he oversaw President Rafael Caldera's adoption of liberalization economic policies in the mid-1990s. He was a prominent critic of President Hugo Chávez and was a candidate to run against him in the 2006 presidential election until he dropped out four months before the vote to support Manuel Rosales. Petkoff launched the newspaper Tal Cual in 2000 and remained its editor until his death in 2018.