MADURO’S CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY, A DICTATORS’ CRIMINAL SHAM

Carlos Sánchez Berzaín
may 30, 2017

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) Castroist’s system dictators spread across the Americas have turned the constituent “assemblies” into a simulation tool to oppress their people and to keep themselves indefinitely in the government. The Constituent Assembly that should be the most important forum of expression for the people’s popular sovereignty and of freedom in democracy, has been transformed as the means to do exactly the opposite; to end basic freedoms, destroy the Rule of Law, concentrate power, institutionalize totalitarian systems, violate human rights and ignore the will of the people whom they subject. The Constituent Assembly that dictator Maduro now manipulates in Venezuela is the deepening of this criminal farce that already oppresses people in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua.

Constituent stands for the power “to establish, to build, to found” and a Constituent Assembly is a gathering of “people’s representatives” to establish the regulations of the government’s organization and to erect a system of cohabitation between all citizens comprising and organized as a political society. Due to the principles of sovereignty, the head of the constituent authority, the ones who have the constituent power, are the people. The native constituent power is that which “creates a state” and the derived one is that which can change the constitution according to the mechanisms established in its own text.

There are two -amongst others- basic features for a constituent assembly to be legitimate; that it be the people’s or popular representation, and that there be democracy. It is about ensuring that people are duly represented, there is respect for basic rights, individual freedoms and human rights, the Rule of Law not be defiled, the division and independence of the branches of government be guaranteed, the universal and secret vote as an expression of the people’s sovereignty be respected, and a plurality of political parties and organizations be permitted. The essence for a constituent assembly to be valid is the “legitimacy of the people’s representation” because any form of replacement or “supplantation” renders it as an attempt against the popular sovereignty, a very serious criminal act.

What is happening since the beginning of the 21st Century is the use of the Constituent Assemblies as a tool of the Castroist-Chavez doctrine in the Americas to break down democracy, raze the republics, institute oppressive and repressive mechanisms, do away with the citizen’s equality, end the Rule of Law, and in a nutshell; to establish dictatorial regimes disguised as democracies under the guise of “new constitutions” that are basically nothing more than simple operating guides of dictatorial regimes that can be changed at the whim of the regime anytime it does not serve its purpose

The false self-proclaimed “new” Latin America constitutionalism promoted and financed by the dictators Castro and Chavez, through Spaniard attorneys and professors, has attempted to establish the premise that “constitutions are the instruments of revolution” and, therefore, they can be changed anytime the circumstances and the interests of the omnipotent dictators deem it necessary.   So, they have done it and/or have changed the constitutions of; Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and emulating what they call Cuba’s constitution have replaced them simply with a set of regulations to ensure an indefinite tenure of the dictatorship.

In Bolivia, as an example, the so-called Constitution of the Pluri-National State that governs today, wrecked the Republic of Bolivia and supplanted it with the Castroist model that now sustains Evo Morales in power.   It was forcibly passed violating the Bolivian constitutional regime, counterfeiting an unanticipated and not allowed Constituent Assembly, simulating a constituent assembly whose proposal was altered by a Special Commission of Congress in an ordinary session that ended up drafting that which the Castroists sought on the basis of Law 3941 the best example of usurpation of duties and responsibilities, shifting these from the Constituent Assembly (which was already illegal and illegitimate) to a controlled congress. Evo Morales’ constitution is one more from the Castroist’s or 21^st Century Socialism imposed on the people violating the Rule of Law, in other words a Coup d’état.

Ecuador’s constituent assembly is sadly remembered by its constitutional “mandates” that simply ended up as basic instruments for the violation of human rights and basic freedoms such as the iconic “mandate 13” which will remain in the records of jurisprudence as the most absurd and unconceivable act of dictatorial power.

What dictator Maduro is attempting in Venezuela today is to pass to the final phase of the Castroist styled dictatorship, the corporative and criminal fascism, in order to illegitimately continue to retain power and forcibly subject the Venezuelan people. It is his attempt to use the Constituent Assembly excuse to establish dictatorial regulations applicable and enforced by shear force and violence against human rights and provide a pretext so that the frontal and covert international accomplices from the Castroist dictatorial system, will continue tolerating and supporting it.

Venezuelan people are victims of a shameless attempt to legitimize the dictatorship, deepening it into a corporative and totalitarian system, in the midst of an international community that silently watches how these criminal acts are convened, executed, and seek to be consolidated. What Venezuelans are living through today with Nicolas Maduro’s maneuver to implement a Constituent Assembly, is simply a repeat of a criminal farce that has been executed in the non-democratic America of the so-called 21^st Century Socialism that openly shows its fascist nature that was disguised up to now as a leftist, populist, or progressive movement.

Published in Spanish by Diario las Américas on Sunday May 28th, 2017