Early Life
He was the son of Eugene Pignat de Bellard and Mercedes Pietri Boulton. Eugene Pignat de Bellard was an American physician giving his services to the oil industry of the area of Maracaibo. Mercedes Pietri was the daughter of a well-respected family in Caracas, who own a large cacao plantation in Barlovento.
After obtaining his high school Diploma from the Colegio San Ignacio in Caracas he entered the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV). During the late 1940s several students saw a communist threat in the advent to government of a bunch of radical far-left politicians and decided to forestall the feared red invasion. They began by sticking anti-communism posters throughout the town. After a series of police raids netting several UCV "hotheads" and serious government warnings to the student’s parents, de Bellard Sr. decided to pack his son off to Colombia, to study at Bogotá University. The elder de Bellard wanted his son to follow in his own steps as a physician. While a sophomore there, Eugenio virtually witnessed the assassination of Colombia’s popular leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan and the carnage ensuing the murder of Colombia’s hope for democratization in politics. Seeing thousands of deaths, mass imprisonment and a resurfacing of the traditional Colombian animosity against Venezuelans, made Eugenio decide to return to Caracas and tell his father that he wanted to study law. He went to Spain, where he became a lawyer at Salamanca University. Back in Venezuela he obtained his doctorate in law at Merida Los Andes University. Then he joined Shell de Venezuela and in 1969 became secretary of the board of Directors until 1974, a post he again held in PDVSA between 1979 and 1981, and in Corpoven from 1985 until 1987 when he retired.
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