Eliminate liberal professions, a Castroist-Chavist political objective

Carlos Sánchez Berzaín
december 26, 2017

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) Dictatorships seek “to control the whole range of human activity and to occupy the whole of social space.” In a dictatorship, a human being is only an element of the State, this is why they institutionalize the violation of human rights and ignore all basic freedoms. The political objective of Castroist-Chavist dictatorships is to eliminate liberal professions, just as it happened some decades ago in Cuba with the Castro’s, and in Venezuela with Chavez and Maduro, and just how Evo Morales is now replicating this in Bolivia.

Liberal professions are all of “those activities in which the use of the intellect prevails that have been acknowledged by the State and whose practice is enabled through the granting of an academic title.” It is “the pursuit of a career building academic curriculum in universities and colleges or in post-secondary special schools, by in large encompassing intellectual activity and effort, although they do not exclude manual dexterity.” The nature of a liberal profession is such that “there is not a dependency, or permanent relationship with the patrons, although there may be habitually in requiring their services” even if such independence may be “compromised under certain modalities of labor law.”

Liberal professions are prominent in the areas of; law, health care, finance, science, technology, linguistics and communications, psychology, research and development, and much more. Specialization, along with the advancement of science and technology, broaden each time the liberal profession’s environment that is based on having freedom, because every human being must have the freedom to choose his or her profession, the freedom to determine his or her line of work, the place where to work, his or her work relationship, his or her clients, and even the freedom to choose his or her employer.

In a dictatorship the whole pool of workers, and above it all the intellectual types, must be subjected to the dominance and control of the State as an instrument of the dictator. The imposition and violence against a human being is evident from the very moment he or she is told what he or she must, or may study, to the moment where he or she is told how to practice his or her profession. The regime is the one who determines if a professional works, and if so; where, how, when, and how much he or she will earn. The pursuit and practice of free professions is only possible under democracy’s freedom, with the guarantee of the Rule of Law, such as the exercise of rights and the enjoyment of fundamental freedoms.

This is why the Castroist-Chavist dictatorships mandate laws aimed at eliminating the freedom of the professions in order to gradually or abruptly subject them to their power, going to extreme measures until they convert the professional into a dependent and malleable element of the regime. Attorneys are usually the first victims, as what has already happened in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, where it is only possible to practice that profession within the framework of the “new judicial order” and where attorneys are turned into operators of despicable laws, threatened to be jailed or exiled if they have the audacity to seek justice, to accuse or to seriously litigate against the abuse, corruption, or crimes of the regime.

It is vital for dictatorships to subjugate physicians. In Cuba they turned them into “slave physicians” an exportable commodity under duress and threats to generate income for the regime, to serve as means of political indoctrination and as a frontal force whenever needed. In Venezuela physicians were opposed to such a scheme but were subjugated by the dictatorship that took them to the humanitarian crisis that country now suffers. In Bolivia they chose to criminalize the medical practice under the guise of protection against “malpractice that causes harm to the health and physical integrity” with a text of a “despicable law” in Article 205 of the dictatorship’s Penal Code.

We had previously addressed the topic of “despicable laws” defining them as “the norm that once drafted and established in abeyance to formal procedures for its creation, violates in its purpose and content the human rights and/or basic freedoms.” Castroist-Chavist dictatorships build their legal system on the basis of despicable laws, replacing the “Rule of Law” with a “right of the State” that constitutes the false legality of the dictatorial regime.

Under the “Rule of Law” there is equal justice for all, judicial authorities are subjected to a preexisting legal framework and must act respecting fundamental freedoms. No one can be above the law or above its precise concept of “legal rulings issued by a competent lawful authority that mandates or prohibits something in consonance with justice and for the common good of the citizenry.” Dictatorships, on the other hand, create their own “rights of the State” that are false rights because they solely represent the “norms of the regime” and turn out to be only arbitrary, shyster props, instituted to oppress and kill freedom with “despicable laws” to subjugated human beings and sustain dictatorships.

In Bolivia the strategy to eliminate liberal professions is underway as a political objective to consolidate the dictatorship. Physicians, health-care professionals, and medical students know this and resist.   They know this because they know the Cuban slaves (physicians) that have been transported by the hundreds to replace Bolivian physicians. They know this because the social networks are showing images of the fight, a few years ago, of the Venezuelan physicians fight against this. They know that Evo Morales’ “despicable judges” will take Bolivian physicians to jail, to exile, or to their death, until they subjugate the rest and convert them into simple pawns of his Plurinational State.

If the Castroist-Chavist intervention in Bolivia -along with dictator Morales’ high treason to the homeland, the repression, the dictatorial propaganda, and the almost total control of the media, and his despicable justice system- accomplishes the discrediting and subjugation of Bolivian physicians, the rest of the professions will fall almost without resistance and the nation will have been dragged quicker towards the crisis, the violence, and hopelessness that Cuba and Venezuela already live under.

Published in Spanish by by Diario las Américas on Sunday December 24th, 2017