By Luis Manuel Aguana
Intergenerational human bridges
connect us with history and with our past. Perhaps from there we should learn
lessons that will help us find our way out of this nightmare that uses the
worst of our people to endure and strengthen itself, in a kind of endless
vicious circle that gets worse and worse as time goes by.
Don Rafael Grooscors Caballero is one of those human bridges. I am told
an anecdote about Guido Grooscors Caballero, his older brother, when he was
secretary to the then candidate Rómulo Gallegos before the December 1947
elections. On a mule ride through Humocaro Alto, in Lara State, a peasant was
shouting in the crowd at the then-campaigning presidential candidate, “General,
General!” trying to get his attention. Don Romulo, in his well-known voice,
said firmly: "I am not a General!"as indicating that Venezuela was in
elections where civilians would be the ones who would change the country's
history. The peasant, with that clear sardonic intelligence of the Venezuelan
people, replied: “No, but you will be...”.
That little anecdote sums up 200 years of republican history. That
peasant was not speaking to Rómulo Gallegos, a civilist and presidential
candidate for an election. He spoke to a power figure who has always led the
destiny of Venezuelans: the military. But beyond that, the anecdote reveals
that even if Don Rómulo Gallegos rode on the back of a mule to the farthest
reaches of Venezuela, the common people would not really believe -and in my
opinion still do not believe- in what that citizen figure of Venezuelan letters
embodied. He only believed in the factual power that was only in the military
and worse, that this citizenship would seek to transform itself into that because
we are in Venezuela.
For the pain of all of us that is what has happened in the end, perhaps
because militarism has been in the DNA of the people since independence. And
perhaps that was the reason why Venezuelans believed that a military man would
be the solution to their ills in 1998. That is the most important cultural -
and even more so, structural - challenge we must face: that citizen thought be
imposed on the militaristic imprint of our past. However, we have gone back more than 60 years
- or perhaps more - in civil terms, and particularly in the last 20 years to do
so. So we need a plan, rather than a return to the civil, which we never really
had, to undertake the construction of a new and genuine citizenship. What we
have enjoyed so far is a mirage of it, and facing its gestation after this
setback will be a political challenge.
But if we add to all this the systematic destruction of the military
institution as we knew it before 2002 by Hugo Chávez, to build instead a
militarist and communist apparatus to sustain this system in power, things get
much more difficult. From the excellent work of Federico Boccanera (see in
Spanish, The business of conspiracy in Venezuela, in http://www.lacabilla.com/ContenidoOpinion/opinion/el-negocio-de-la-conspiracion-en-venezuela-por-federico-boccanera/991)
we extract the following: “The Bolivarian national armed force is the most
finished work of Hugo Chávez, the one that he was able to finish before he
died, is his true legacy, and is the historical culmination of a long process
of convergence -which Chavismo finds natural- between Venezuelan political
militarism and the militarist political system par excellence, communism, which
transforms its leaders into commanders, societies into armies, citizens into
troops, and enshrines a state of permanent war.”
Worst of all, this militarist construction is structured in the 1999
Constitution. Boccanera confirms in his article some of the reasons why in ANCO
we believe it is necessary to change this constitution immediately: “These
military mafias are untouchable and have accumulated wealth and power not
through abuse, but through the supreme design of the Chavista state, whose
constitution of 1999 eliminated the requirement of civilian authorization for
promotion to senior officers and granted them the privilege of a merit trial,
eliminated the prohibition of the simultaneous exercise of military and
civilian authority, and eliminated the apolitical and non-deliberative
character of the military institution, granted the military the right to vote,
and most importantly, established a doctrine of national security and integral
defence, which must be governed by the principle of "co-responsibility
between the State and civil society", which must be exercised in the
economic, social, political, cultural, geographical, environmental and military
spheres (Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, chapter II of
the principles of National Security, art. 326)”
Accordingly, military mafias abuse power not because they can do so by
force, but because they are constitutionally empowered to do so! Could one then
expect that some officer who emerged from that same distorted superstructure,
specially built by Chávez to deepen the militarist state in Venezuela, would
insist on changing the state of things, with the aim of placing the country on
a path where civil and constitutional power prevails within the framework of
the rule of law? Obviously not.
And that's what the country is surprisingly waiting for and what those
who traffic in the conspiracy as a business are taking advantage of, as
Boccanera describes very well in his article. And to think that there are still
Venezuelans who in good faith reject a new Constituent in order to change that,
in the belief of the message repeated thousands of times by the regime that
this is the best constitution in the world.
Paradoxically, however, the 1999 Constitution works in two opposite
directions, paradoxically, 1) guaranteeing the military's permanence in
government, with an unlimited power that has never had any group in the past,
as has been described; and 2) leaving the door open for the people themselves,
with their prerogative of civil, citizen and constitutional participation, to
change this situation (Articles 347, 348, 349 and 350).
In this way, the military situation described as a fatal design gravitating
over the Republic can only be tackled as a citizen by the people, not only by
speaking out in a civil manner against this military superstructure through a
Popular Consultation, but also by calling for a change in it within the
framework of a new National Constituent Assembly of an Original character by
popular initiative.
We could never hope, given the constitutional prerogatives of the
military mafias, that a situation of kidnapping of the population would be
resolved by those who originated it. If the people do not speak out and stand
up as a whole, civilly achieving a change of what was deliberately distorted by
“the supreme design of the Chavista state”, there will be no change in
the current state of affairs in Venezuela. That is how serious and important
the immediate consideration of a Popular Consultation by the population is.
And that's what it's all about, letting the
Venezuelan people decide. Either the people are in favor of the citizenship, or
we have already been defeated by militarism....
Caracas, April 4, 2018
Email: luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
Twitter:@laguana
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