Luis Herrera Campins was elected President of Venezuela at the very moment when things began to go badly wrong for his oil-producing country, which had prospered mightily in the wake of the OPEC-driven price increases of the early 1970s. By the time Herrera Campins's term ended, the boom was over, the economy was in meltdown, poverty and hardship were widespread and the voters turned on the ruling Christian Democrat, ejecting him from office in the December 1983 elections.

Thus began an economic and political crisis for Venezuela that culminated, eight years later, in an operatic putsch by an obscure parachute regiment colonel, after the elected Government had been forced to raise fuel and transport prices, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed in the ensuing riots. The attempted coup failed, and the colonel, Hugo Chávez, spent time in prison for his adventure, but in 1998 he was elected President of Venezuela and is still there today.

Luis Antonio Herrera Campins was born in 1925 in Acarigua, a small town on the vast plains that stretch down from the foothills of the Andes to the Orinoco basin. He liked to describe himself as a “straightforward plainsman”, a humble son of the soil whose rise from obscure provincial origins to the pinnacle of Venezuelan political life was a tribute to the two-party democratic system established after the overthrow of the dictator General Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958.

Herrera was active in student politics at his secondary school in Barquisimeto, the regional capital, and he later studied law at the Central University in Caracas — the classic way into politics for ambitious young Venezuelans. He worked for the weekly magazine of the National Union of Students, UNE, recently founded by Rafael Caldera, and he later joined Caldera's fledgeling Christian Democrat party, COPEI, which emerged out of UNE in 1946, during a brief democratic interlude between military regimes. Herrera became a COPEI youth leader, and took part in a student strike against the Pérez Jiménez regime in 1952. He spent four months in prison before being sent into exile, and he lived for the next six years in Spain. He completed his law studies at the University of Santiago de Compostela, and helped to produce an opposition newspaper, Tiela, that was circulated clandestinely in Venezuela. He returned home after the removal of Pérez Jiménez by his fellow officers in January 1958.

Herrera's first elected position was as a deputy in the assembly of Portuguesa state in 1947. He was elected to Congress for COPEI in 1959, and was party floor leader in the Lower House in 1962-63. He remained in Congress until 1979, representing Portuguesa and Lara states, either as deputy or senator.

He won the December 1978 presidential elections for COPEI, replacing the social democrat Carlos Andrés Pérez, of the Democratic Action (AD) party, who had nationalised the oil industry at the height of the boom in 1975. Oil revenues continued to rise during the early years of Herrera's presidency, and he spent heavily on striking public works projects, such as the state-of-the-art Teresa Carreño theatre and the French-built Caracas Metro system.

Herrera had a dirigiste view of the Government's economic role, which involved channelling public funds into agricultural and industrial projects, paying generous subsidies and controlling the prices of many goods. His Government continued President Pérez's policy of borrowing on a world market awash with petrodollars, and by the early 1980s Venezuela owed the banks more than $20 billion. The Government's tacit assumption was that oil prices would remain high forever, and would sustain high levels of public and private consumption.

When oil revenues began to decline, a financial crisis was inevitable, despite Herrera's belated efforts to cut public spending. It came to a head in February 1983, when the Government was forced to devalue the bolívar on what was known as Black Friday. From a fixed rate of 4.3 to the dollar, the currency floated to between 12 and 15 by the end of Herrera's term, and the days of shopping in Miami or Aruba for the Caracas middle classes were over. Exchange controls, using several different rates for the dollar, proved to a disastrous failure. The COPEI candidate was heavily defeated in the 1983 presidential election, and the party began a long decline that has continued to this day.

From 1986 to 1989 Herrera was general secretary of the Christian Democrat International, and he remained a working journalist until the mid-1990s. His personal austerity was proverbial, and, unlike many of his predecessors and successors, he did not use public office to enrich himself.

Luis Herrera Campins, journalist, lawyer and former President of Venezuela, was born on May 4, 1925. He died on November 9, 2007, aged 82