Willian Lara

Who was Willian Lara?

Willian Lara was a Venezuelan politician. Elected several times to the National Assembly, he was the Minister of Communication and Information between 2006 and 2008 and Governor of Guárico state from 2008 to 2010. Prior to the creation of the PSUV in 2007, he was the national director of its main predecessor, the Fifth Republic Movement, having been one of its founders in 1997.

Lara was born in El Socorro, in Guárico state, in 1959. After studying social communication at the Central University of Venezuela and completing a masters in political science at the Simón Bolívar University, he became a professor at the latter.

He was elected to the National Assembly in 2000 and was its President from 2000 to 2002. He was elected to the 1999 Constitutional Assembly which wrote the new Constitution of Venezuela. Lara played a key role in the efforts to institute internal democracy in the MVR; in June 2003 it became the first Venezuelan political party to do so, with over a million members taking part in the first elections.

In early 2006 Lara sharply criticized the government's media policy, and was subsequently appointed Minister of Communication and Information, replacing Yuri Pimentel after the latter had been in office only seven months; he was succeeded by Andrés Izarra. He was elected governor of Guárico state in the 2008 regional elections.