THE VIOLENT AGONY OF ORGANIZED CRIME’S DICTATORSHIPS

Carlos Sánchez Berzaín
April 12, 2019

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) Cuba’s Castroist dictatorship was saved in 1999 by Hugo Chavez’s generous gifts to Fidel Castro thus creating a criminal undertaking cloaked as a political one, something called Bolivarian Movement, ALBA, and 21^st Century Socialism, that today is known as the Castroist Chavist system.  America’s nations have been and still are victims of human rights’ violations, the annihilation of democracy, and the taking of power and government by a criminal group that still oppresses Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, where people endure the violent agony of organized crime’s dictatorships, with an impact throughout the region.

Politics are “that which is public, meaning civil, and which is relative to the affairs of the citizen”.  In politics, the main effort is public service because “it is a bunch of to dos, framed into the common good”.  It is about “the efforts by which a free society, comprised by individuals who are free, solve the problems that arise out of their collective coexistence” with ideological means for the access to power by persons or groups that “lead and safeguard the rights of the population”.

Besides public service, there is the framework of “democracy” as a “form of government in which political power is exercised by the citizenry” that recognizes that sovereignty rests in the people.  In the Americas, democracy has five indispensable fundamental components; “respect for human rights and basic individual freedoms; access to power and its discharge subordinated to the rule of law;  conducting periodic, free, and fair elections based upon the concepts of  universal suffrage and secrecy as expressions of the people’s sovereignty; the existence of a plural regime of political parties and organizations; and the separation and independence of the branches of government”.

While politics must be a free unbounded activity that is legal, subject to oversight, temporary, subject to accountability and public scrutiny, we have seen that quite the opposite happens in a criminal environment in which “all action or omission is contrary to the lawfulness of the society”.  Criminal is the adjective used to describe “the collective aggregate of criminals”, a group of people who commit crime and who attempt against society and those who comprise it.

Crime is such a great threat that practically all of the States from throughout the world are part of “the United Nations’ Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime” or “The Palermo Convention”, that in its preamble has a summarized statement by Kofi Annan who said; “If the preeminence of the law is undermined, not only in one country but in several countries, those who defend it cannot be restrained to use only domestic means and arbiters.  If the enemies of progress and of human rights attempt to take advantage of the possibilities that globalization offers to accomplish their objectives, we must also take advantage by using these same means to defend human rights and defeat crime, corruption and human trafficking.”

Within this framework, there is no doubt that the Castroist dictatorship that oppresses Cuba for over 60 years, is a group of Organized Crime.  There isn’t any doubt either that the process to expand the Castroist Chavist system, after its alliance with Hugo Chavez, the Castroist Chavist system that controls Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, is a long succession of crime that is repeated and recurring continuously and that has effects, directly or indirectly, throughout the Americas.

Within the framework of the Palermo Convention that is binding for Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, Castroist Chavist Transnational Organized Crime members must be treated as common criminals.  It is urgent for democratic governments to stop condoning these regimes’ criminality by disavowing their alibi of being political undertakings who hold power that in-turn allows them to claim presidential immunity, sovereignty -something they trample upon- call for no-intervention to territories they oppress by force and daily, recurrent, official crime.

The Castro’s/Diaz- Canel, Maduro, Cabello, Padrino, Ortega, Murillo, Morales and more, are criminal who usurp politics and stain it with the complicity of functional oppositions and groups subjected by terror, corruption, and misery.  Today, all of them agonize with violence.  Organized Crime’s dictators are losing political power in their violent agony, just as they took over the power, and just as they have discharged this power.

*Attorney & Political Scientist.  Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.

Published in Spanish by Infobae.com Sunday, April 7th 2019