The role of so-called oppositions in the creation and permanence of 21st Century Socialism’s dictatorships in the Americas

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy)

Twenty-First Century Socialism or Castrochavism has been able to export and expand Cuba’s dictatorship’s model into Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua along with an indefinite usurpation of power and impunity, supplanting the “rule of law” with the “rule for oppression.” With some governments dubbed as leftist, however, it has not been able to implant dictatorships and democracy remains in the majority of countries. The difference is in the conduct of the political opposition who, as in the case of dictatorships, is part of its creation and permanence and who -in democracies- deter a dictatorial imposition.

The creation of dictatorships in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua started with the take-over of the government through electoral processes with proposals of re-founding democracy and changing the country. They proposed to end the worn-out and corrupt traditional political system and a lengthy variety of populist proposals that a few years later resulted in misery, violence, and organized crime. Once in power, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, uniformly implanted “a political system contrary to the democratic principles and the standards of the rule of law.”

Ecuador recovered democracy thanks to the vision and leadership of President Lenin Moreno that restored the basic components of democracy, ending political imprisonment, persecution, exile, torture, and ending the existence of the narco-State. Even if those affected and detractors, seek to manipulate the causes of the process, in light of the results, Ecuador is proof that it is possible to escape from a Castrochavist dictatorship.

Constituent Assemblies have been the mechanism to wreck the democratic system and replace it with the dictatorial system in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, having used reforms and modifications in Nicaragua. In those countries where political oppositions have allowed these manipulations with covenants, submission, and even voting, dictatorships have been implanted. In each and every case where dictatorships have consolidated, there was the regime’s participation and accord with the opposition with parliamentary representation or at the very least with a part of such representation, with a variety of arguments and excuses but with the installment of a dictatorship as the result.

Twenty-First Century Socialism’s governments; in Uruguay with Mujica, in Paraguay with Lugo, Brazil with Lula and Rousseff, Argentina with the Kirchner couple, Peru with Castillo, were not able to established dictatorships and have surrendered the government when faced with electoral results or because the prosecution of President Rousseff, or the destitution of Castillo due to his attempted coup d’état. This is what is happening with the governments of Lopez Obrador in Mexico and Fernandez/Kirchner in Argentina who, even though they constantly insist in breaking the democratic order, are stopped by the opposition, the free press, and democratic institutions.

To be able to distinguish between true opposition and the one who surrenders to the implantation of the dictatorship to be then left as a “functional opposition,” all one has to do is to observe the place and condition of their leaders. Some remain in the circles of the dictatorships with roles of public participation and activities apparently normal, while others are persecuted, imprisoned, exiled, attacked, and subjected to all types of violations of their human rights and individual freedoms. The lists of political prisoners and the bureaucracy of the dictatorial systems in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, prove it.

The opposition members who have surrendered democracy are the ones who pretend to present the dictatorships from Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua as “normal” governments, revolutionary processes for change, or simple crises. They are the “functional opposition” who participates in the vote-catching dictatorships wherein people vote but do not elect, they are the ones who legitimize the regime’s institutionalized fraud. They are the ones who ignore the practice of torture, the existence of politically persecuted, imprisoned, or exiled, they are the ones who refer to them as a problem of the Judicial or of police abuse, arguments with which they coverup the dictatorship.

The para-dictatorial -or functional- opposition is a simulation at the expense of the people’s human rights and also works at the international level, confusing and discouraging allies with multiple, diverse, and often contradictory proposals, with the discrediting of leaderships in order to destroy their credibility and hinder cooperation to the real civil resistance.

The most despicable and usual practice of a functional opposition in a dictatorship is to keep and promote division, to fracture and divide the opposition and prevent any effort towards national unity -through ideological, programmatic, or personal arguments- so that organized crime’s dictatorships with an 80% of popular rejection, continue simulating electoral victories.

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

Translation from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas