Electoral crime in Venezuela proves the peoples’ defenselessness

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) Twenty-first century socialism’s dictators, or Castrochavism, have the distinctive feature of announcing and promoting the crimes they are going to commit, publicize them internationally, commit them and end-up imposing them as a political agenda. That is the strategy, under Cuba’s command, that is being applied in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, to present the most horrendous and diverse crimes as political acts and indefinitely remain in power with total impunity. This is the case of the criminal undertaking that is being called “Venezuela’s parliamentary elections” that took place on 6 December (6D) that is proof of the peoples’ defenselessness.

I insist that in Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, and Nicaragua there are no elections, there is balloting in which the citizenry is forced to cast a vote, but cannot elect. The citizenry vote but do not elect, they are violated by having their will ignored, substituted and/or replaced through fraud, counterfeiting and crime that liquidate universal suffrage, the people’s equality before the law, and make the holding of “free and fair” elections impossible. Castrochavism has made the manipulation of elections through crime one of its most fundamental components.

Castrochavism’s regimes have established themselves on the concept of “vote-catching dictatorships” that are defined as “the regimes that either by force or violence, concentrate all political power in one person or group that represses human rights and individuals’ basic freedoms and uses elections as the means of simulation and propaganda to remain indefinitely in power”.

Castrochavist dictatorships use “systematic fraud” that is introduced through their despicable constitutions and laws that they pride themselves of, to; invalidate the universal suffrage and make it disappear, extinguish the equality of citizens before the law, and manipulate the laws to build absolute majorities with counterfeited minorities. They also use “factual fraud” or fraud of deed, compelling the citizenry to vote with threats to their job security, shortages of food, threats to their basic needs, the use of violence, technological manipulation of results, complicity of “functional oppositions”, inexistence of unbiased or impartial officials, counterfeiting of the voters’ registry, alteration of those registries and more.

Watching the case of the so-called parliamentary elections of Venezuela (6D) including but not limiting it to the criminal deeds committed to conduct this “election in a dictatorship” are those of supplantation of officials and institutions by the creation of a Constituent Assembly, imposing an apocryphal Supreme Justice Tribunal, attributing to itself the rights of the people, conducting political persecution against the leadership and candidates from the opposition, illegal detentions, torture, dictatorship’s rigged judicial proceedings, disavowing the legal rights of the opposition’s political parties, threats against citizens to force them to vote, and in the case of indigenous populations, the open supplantation of the universal and secret suffrage, material and ideological counterfeiting, use of falsified instruments, the misuse of public funds, the production and dissemination of fake news and more.

They did it in Bolivia on 18 October and are repeating it on 6D in Venezuela. They commit dozens of crimes all linked together, truly befitting of the regime and real criminal deeds are put on parade on announced criminal scenarios, with a script, publicized and carried out with premeditation, with malicious aforethought, and with great success, that culminates with impunity granted to the perpetrators and the generation of indignity, uncertainty, frustration, and powerlessness in the peoples who remain in a proven and repeated “state of defenselessness”.

Facing the crimes that 21st Century Socialism calls “elections”, the peoples from Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, and Nicaragua are defenseless. The state of defenselessness is “the situation into which someone is thrusted that prevents or unduly limits the defense of his/her right” and its consequence is the “nullity of every act therein”. Uniform jurisprudence establishes that in a state of defenselessness, the citizenry “find themselves defenseless and unprotected, in other words; without the physical and judicial means of defense or with those means that are not enough to resist or repel the attacks, the infringement of their basic rights”.

Having executed electoral crimes in Bolivia and already benefitting from the illicit results obtained with the reinstatement of the dictatorship and the on-going application of crimes in Venezuela to end the National Assembly and the legitimate President with announced international complicity, another replica of these same crimes is coming to Nicaragua and the peoples there are defenseless. To revert this situation is the task of; international organizations, democratic countries, and true oppositions.

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

Translated from Spanish by; Edgar L. Terrazas, member of the American Translators Association, ATA # 234680.