Rómulo Betancourt Assassinated?

In July 24 1960, Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt was the target of an assassination attempt which consisted of the detonation of a car bomb in the middle of a parade celebrating the Battle of Carabobo in Caracas. Though two people died, Betancourt got away with only severe burns in his hands.

What if he was fatally wounded? Would Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic and the person behind the whole plot (If Wikipedia is to be believed, he had an obsessive hatred of Betancourt) be assassinated earlier? Would there be any consequences to South American (Colombia, Brazil and the like) stability as a whole? Who would succeed Betancourt as president of Venezuela?
 
I'm not sure what the succession procedures were in 1960. Under the 1961 Constitution, "the Chambers shall, within the next thirty days, proceed to elect a new President, by secret vote and in joint session, for the remainder of the constitutional term....In either case, until a new President is elected and assumes office, the Presidency shall be occupied by the President of Congress; if there is none, by the Vice President of Congress and, in his default, by the President of the Supreme Court of Justice."
The President of the Senate under the 1961 Constitution was the President of Congress (the President of the Chamber of Deputies being Vice President of Congress.) http://confinder.richmond.edu/admin/docs/venezuela.pdf

If the same rule was in effect in 1960, Raul Leoni, President of the Senate would become President of Venezuela until Congress could elect a new President of Venezuela. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raúl_Leoni Leoni was in fact the man who in OTL was elected president in 1964, succeeding Betancourt.
 
Interesting. An earlier Rafael Caldera administration (he was the guy who succeeded Leoni IOTL), perhaps? Also, how would the rest of America, particularly Castro and the US, react to Betancourt's assassination? Could it somehow allow Nixon to defeat Kennedy in the presidential election (as I recall, Nixon was a foreign policy wonk)?

As for the Dominican Republic, what would happen if Trujillo ended up being killed a year earlier? Would Juan Bosch still return from exile and become president (hopefully he wouldn't be overthrown...)? Would the Mirabal sisters (particularly Minerva) embark on a political career since their murder would probably be butterflied away?
 
Interesting. An earlier Rafael Caldera administration (he was the guy who succeeded Leoni IOTL), perhaps? Also, how would the rest of America, particularly Castro and the US, react to Betancourt's assassination?

The rest of the Western Hemisphere, including even the US, would probably react badly to Betancourt's assassination (after all, Betancourt was not Communist and in some cases the US courted Aprista parties as a democratic alternative to the Communists as part of the Alliance for Progress thing). Even Caldera would probably be on board in finding out who was responsible for the assassination of a Venezuelan President. Ergo, if Juan Bosch could be "tamed", he'd have a chance at President of the Dominican Republic.
 
The rest of the Western Hemisphere, including even the US, would probably react badly to Betancourt's assassination (after all, Betancourt was not Communist and in some cases the US courted Aprista parties as a democratic alternative to the Communists as part of the Alliance for Progress thing). Even Caldera would probably be on board in finding out who was responsible for the assassination of a Venezuelan President. Ergo, if Juan Bosch could be "tamed", he'd have a chance at President of the Dominican Republic.
If the assassination creates an international crisis, maybe Nixon could use his foreign policy experience to defeat JFK? And yeah, everyone in Venezuela would be screaming for Trujillo's head. As for Bosch, I believe the problem with him is not becoming president (he did IOTL with little difficulty in 1962) but not being ousted in a military coup just a few months later.
 
If the assassination creates an international crisis, maybe Nixon could use his foreign policy experience to defeat JFK?
Could you please elaborate on this? I fail to see how the murder of some Venezuelan politician would affect the outcome of the 1960 election in Dick’s favor.
 
Could you please elaborate on this? I fail to see how the murder of some Venezuelan politician would affect the outcome of the 1960 election in Dick’s favor.
The assassination attempt on Betancourt (who wasn't just some random politician, but the president) was planned and financed by Rafael Trujillo, the infamous dictator of the Dominican Republic. If Betancourt is killed and Trujillo's connections to the plot are still discovered, I would expect some sort of international crisis to occur.
 
The assassination attempt on Betancourt (who wasn't just some random politician, but the president) was planned and financed by Rafael Trujillo, the infamous dictator of the Dominican Republic. If Betancourt is killed and Trujillo's connections to the plot are still discovered, I would expect some sort of international crisis to occur.
Would the upper puppet string connections lead to JFK or Nixon, assuming the CIA is incompetent enough to let such classified info enter the public eye and be given proper media attention?
 
Would the upper puppet string connections lead to JFK or Nixon, assuming the CIA is incompetent enough to let such classified info enter the public eye and be given proper media attention?
That didn't happen IOTL even though Betancourt survived and called for OAS sanctions against Trujillo, so no.
 
Could you please elaborate on this? I fail to see how the murder of some Venezuelan politician would affect the outcome of the 1960 election in Dick’s favor.

Not so much influence the outcome of the election but force the US to do something since apparently ITTL it failed to keep its "backyard" under control. It could probably be spun by the US as the Soviet Union trying to force a provocation in an attempt to create another Communist base (which would thus cover up the CIA's tracks) and thus create the opportunity for the US to fix an international crisis (or, in other words, Trujillo would have outlived his usefulness).
 
1960 election was decided when LBJ and Dick Daley political machines cast respectively Texas and Illinois in Dem column. I don't see as Betwncourt assassination could change that and the fact Nixon (who was hated in Vehezuela, see his diplomatic trip here and the protests against US I volley in Guatemalan Coup of 1954) did a bade debate performance. It could also an opportunity for JFK to promote his imagine as maverick and young commander-in-chief. If someone do two plus two and link Trujilo-CIA-Nixon, Tricky Dicky could even lose votes.
 
If the assassination creates an international crisis, maybe Nixon could use his foreign policy experience to defeat JFK?

No. If anything, the more of a mess Latin America seems to be, the more it benefits Kennedy (though probably only to a small extent since that's not an issue most Americans were focused on). After all, Nixon is representing the administration under whose watch these things happened--and unlike Ike he doesn't have great personal popularity to shield him when things go badly.

And the assassination of a democratically elected non-Communist left of center president by a right-wing dictatorship would simply strengthen JFK's argument that the US had been too lenient on right-wing dictatorships in Latin America --which JFK managed to combine with criticizing the Eisenhower administration for letting Castro come to power by arguing that the US did not do enough to bolster non-Castroite democratic alternatives to Batista. "The third, and perhaps most disastrous of our failures, was the decision to give stature and support to one of the most bloody and repressive dictatorships in the long history of Latin American repression. Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in seven years...Yet our aid to his regime, and the ineptness of our policies, enabled Batista to invoke the name of the United States in support of his reign of terror....For we have not only supported a dictatorship in Cuba - we have propped up dictators in Venezuela, Argentina, Columbia, Paraguay and the Dominican Republic." https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives...ches/cincinnati-oh-19601006-democratic-dinner

But again, the number of votes affected would probably be very small.

Now the assassination of a democratically elected conservative president by Castro might help Nixon. But even that is doubtful since JFK was hard to accuse of being "soft on communism"--much of his campaign was devoted to criticizing the Eisenhower administration as not spending enough on defense.
 
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1960 election was decided when LBJ and Dick Daley political machines cast respectively Texas and Illinois in Dem column.

Very dubious, IMO, at least for Illinois. (It's actually more plausible for Texas, even though JFK's margin was greater there, because Texas had no equivalent to Downstate Illinois, where GOP control of the electoral machinery could counterbalance that of the Democrats in Chicago.). See my post at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/soc.history/Rcp9bdYITJk/IIxsHUiXSq8J and also https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2000/10/was-nixon-robbed.html

But in any event, that's really irrelevant here since, as I posted above, I think if anything the assassination would hurt Nixon if only very slightly.
 
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