TO REINSTATE DEMOCRACY IS A RIGHT, NOT A COUP D’ ETAT

Carlos Sánchez Berzaín
july 4, 2017

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) Castroist dictatorship oppressing Venezuela and its executor the dictator Nicolas Maduro, in the course of his unavoidable fall, have attempted to present themselves as victims of a “coup d’état” when facing the upheaval by the people ready to recover their freedom. When the government violates, on a daily basis, the human rights of its people and takes them down to a humanitarian crisis, when all democratic institutionalism has been violated and an interventionist and tyrannical regime has been forcibly imposed, the nation’s people not only have the right but also the duty to recoup their sovereignty; the reinstatement of democracy is not a coup d’état, but the exercising of a fundamental right.

The essential feature of a coup d’état is the “violation of the legitimacy and institutional legality of a state”. A coup d’état attempts against and violates the “legal guidelines and procedures for succession in power in order to take the government and remain therein violating the Rule of Law”. The coup d’état breaks down all institutionalism and the democratic system in order to benefit its actors and “against the will of the people expressed in free elections”. Coups d’état are violent, but there are also the soft kind, when the breaking down of the democracy occurs through “indirect and generally peaceful conspiratorial techniques”.

The objective reality shows that Venezuela was robbed of its democracy several years ago through a series of successive soft and peaceful coups d’état executed from within its own government. The succession, after Hugo Chavez’s death, was a coup d’état when Nicolas Maduro was made eligible to be a candidate; the elections rigged with electoral fraud and ensuing anxiety to illegitimately confirm Maduro’s candidacy was another coup; the control by the executive of the Judicial Branch, the Supreme Justice Tribunal, and National Electoral Council did away with the separation and independence of the branches of government even all the way back to Chavez; the political imprisonment of members of the opposition, the exiled and politically persecuted and the absence of freedom of the press are ample evidence of a dictatorial regime; the rejection of the National Assembly’s authority and its replacement through judicial manipulation were more coups d’état.

The latest coup d’état by the dictatorship is “Maduro’s Constituent Assembly” a crazy fascist scheme to definitively replace the popular will of the Venezuelan people that already suffers the intervention of its territory and economy by the Castroist regime from Cuba.   The subjugation by and the submission to a foreign power, the treason to the homeland and the submissive handing over of its natural resources for foreign benefit are also factors that have driven the Venezuelan people to the current crisis situation, hunger, insecurity, desperation and misery.

As if the aforementioned were not enough, we must add the affront that the Venezuelan people endure, the corruption and narcotics trafficking that have generated huge ill-gotten fortunes.   The coverup of the Odebrecht case is an indication of a corruption case that in Venezuela seems to be small because the harshest crimes are centered on the PDVSA. Castroist-Chavism has turned the country into a “narcotics trafficking hub” and has earned the state its designation as a “Narco-State”, with the existence of notable cartels made up by high level officials in the government and their relatives who commercialize cocaine from Colombia’s FARC and the coca leaf growers’ unions led by Evo Morales in Bolivia, all of this with links to Islamic terrorism , which aside from being a dishonor for the Venezuelans is a threat to international peace and security. .

The Venezuelan people are the victims of a dictatorship that got settled through multiple coups d’état. Venezuelans are only exercising their legitimate defense under conditions of absolute inequality. Technology allows for the world to see, in real time, Nicolas Maduro’s Castroist dictatorship’s abuses and crimes, and it also shows the Venezuelan youth, the elderly, the laborers and even the military, the whole of Venezuelan people asking for the reinstatement of democracy, that is “a right” acknowledged by the Interamerican Democratic Charter. What the people on the streets of Venezuela want is for the dishonoring and violent regime to end and for democracy to be reinstated to regain normalcy, and afterwards to fight against the crisis.

Nothing that has transpired this past few years in Venezuela would have happened under a democratic system. The whole crisis and all of the crimes, the murders, political prisoners, exiled, politically persecuted, the harassed and destroyed free press, the violation of basic human rights, the absence of the Rule of Law and more, is all the result of a belatedly acknowledged and internationally condoned dictatorship, protected by moneys it misappropriates from the people and turns into bribes through schemes such as Petrocaribe, the mooring of fake mediators, the payments to apologists, the hiring of powerful lobbyists and law offices in the United States and other countries in the world.

This is why when Venezuelans decide not to abandon their street protests until they regain democracy, when against all odds and threats and at the risk of their lives they ask for the dictatorship to leave the government, they are only exercising a sacred and fundamental right to have freedom. To fight to reinstate democracy is not a coup d’état, it is a human right and it is the great example by the Venezuelan people that we all must have solidarity with, because their victory is a victory of the people of the Americas.

Published in Spanish by Diario las Américas on Sunday July 2nd, 2017

Translated from Spanish by; Edgar L. Terrazas, Member of the American Translators’ Assn, ATA # 234680.