Venezuelan businessman Gustavo Cisneros, magnate of the communications sector, president of the Cisneros Organization, founder of the television channel Venevisión and Cisneros Media, owner of the Miss Venezuela Organization and, for several decades, owner of one of the largest fortunes in Latin America, died this Friday at the age of 78 in New York. The cause of death was pneumonia, which he contracted after spinal surgery.
Born on June 1, 1945 in Caracas, Gustavo was the fourth son of Diego Cisneros, a Cuban businessman with ties to the transportation industry who emigrated to Venezuela and amassed a considerable fortune in the 1950s and 1960s. The Cisneros family had increased their fortune by acquiring the rights to produce and bottle Pepsi Cola in the country.
Cisneros received his secondary and higher education in the United States and graduated with honors in administration from Babson College in Massachusetts. An excellent student and already an experienced businessman, he took over the presidency of his father's organization at an early age in 1970, when he was just 25 years old.
After the expansion with the introduction of democracy and the gradual takeover of some companies, in 1960 Diego Cisneros, Gustavo's father, had taken a fundamental step in building the power of the family conglomerate: he bought the then bankrupt Televisa network and founded Venevisión one of the most popular for many years and most influential television channels in Venezuela and Latin America. One of the channel's great successes was Sábado Sensacional, a Saturday music news marathon that peaked in the 1980s and is still broadcast, being the longest-running show on Venezuelan television.
In the seventies, at the most flourishing moment of Venezuelan democracy, the Cisneros family, already with Gustavo at the helm, expanded its businesses with great speed, becoming one of the most powerful families in the country and then initiated an internationalization plan that would crystallize it emerged fully in the following decade.
During this period, Cisneros acquired the nationwide RadioVisión circuit and bought the famous supermarket chain Cada, the largest and most branched supermarket chain in the country, until its sale in 1995, when the company decided to get rid of some properties and expand its investments in the world of to direct international telecommunications. .
The Cisneros organization's expansion at the time also included local representation of NCR Financial Corporation, the Sears retail chain (briefly renamed Maxys); the purchase of Fisa laboratories; the rights to market and distribute Chicco children's products; the founding of the PuroPan company; the founding of the record label Sono Rodven; representing the fast food chains Burger King and Pizza Hut; and the rights to broadcast Miss Venezuela.
In the hands of Cisneros and supported by the reach and influence of Venevisión, this competition quickly became one of the most popular events in the country, offering more elaborate shows each year and winning numerous scepters for local beauty queens. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Cisneros, on an irreversible path to international expansion, continued to purchase and market assets: the exclusive representation of Apple products; the purchase of Galerías Preciados in Spain; the creation of Venevisión Internacional; the purchase of the Chilevisión chain; from the Spanish-language American television network Univisión; from Pueblo supermarkets; from AOL Latin America; from the blockbuster Latin America; the Colombian Caracol Televisión, the Argentinian cable channel Much Music and the international cable network Galaxy Latin America.
Cisneros was not only the most powerful businessman in Venezuela, but also reached top positions in the ranking of the region's richest. The companies of the Cisneros organization – later renamed simply Cisneros – are now represented in 50 countries. Gustavo Cisneros is married to Patricia Phelps, a renowned art collector and cultural promoter, and is the father of three children. The eldest of them, Adriana, is now managing director and CEO of the family business.
The businessman's power cost him the resistance of many parts of the Venezuelan left, which usually accused the authorities of favoring this type of wealth for their own benefit, turning away from the interests of the population. A friend of Carlos Andrés Pérez and other politicians of the democratic regime, Venevisión's television content became famous in the 1980s for its anti-Castroism and militant anti-communism.
However, in 1998, after the victory of Hugo Chávez, Cisneros, like other businessmen in the country, initially showed sympathy for a politician who was then emerging from a leader who claimed to have only a political project to reformulate democracy Castro's authoritarianism. A rift subsequently occurred between the two, helping to trigger one of the several political crises that Venezuela experienced during the period of the Bolivarian Revolution, culminating in 2002 when the country's commercial television networks clashed violently with Chávez.
After repeatedly accusing Cisneros and the owners of other Venezuelan television stations of encouraging a coup to oust him and being the target of attacks by Chavista militancy, both finally agreed to quit in 2004 at the request of former US President Jimmy Carter. final for their mutual attacks. From that moment on, Cisneros withdrew most of his capital from Venezuela and completely distanced himself from local politics, earning him the dislike of the opposition. The once very powerful Venevisión increasingly weakened the critical tone of its content and the entire Venezuelan television lost the slow and belligerent tone that had characterized it until then. Cisneros had left the list of the world's richest millionaires in 2020.