By Luis
Manuel Aguana
Intervention
in the Forum-conversatory: "Venezuela Defeats the Regime and
Begins Reconstruction, Let the People Decide the Path to the Cease of
Usurpation", Maturín, 20 July 2019
I begin by
thanking Eastern civil society for this new opportunity to discuss
proposals aimed at resolving the serious crisis the country is going
through. And this crisis is not only economic, political and social,
but also one of citizenship, values and proposals. The country is
dying in the streets, without water, without electricity, without
security, without food, and the citizens only contemplate the
political leadership disputing public positions as drunkards do when
they fight for an empty bottle. No proposals are debated.
They want
us to accept without further ado the same electoral solution whose
failure we have lived and suffered with the regime without concrete
results for the Nation. They want us to wait a year for elections and
then begin to resolve the lives of Venezuelans. More cynicism
impossible! And even if elections were held, what good would it do if
anyone elected could not solve the problems of the population because
of an unviable country system, which constitutionally prescribes that
regions are only given a crumb of the Public Treasury. So what
solution is that for the people?
At ANCO we
made a stop to actively disseminate our Constituent proposal to
promote a Country Project -project through which you knew us- from
May 1, 2017 when the illegitimate Miraflores occupies illegally
summoned a Constituent without the approval of the Venezuelan people.
We began on May 3 of that year to actively promote and
institutionally propose a popular consultation to stop this
unconstitutional call. And our proposal became the policy of the
opposition when the Venezuelan people called for the historic Popular
Consultation on July 16, 2017.
History
has called us once again to go out into the country, this time to
propose a variant of our principled desideratum, which points out
that Venezuela's destiny must irrevocably pass through a decision of
the sovereign people. And what we are
proposing now is a Plebiscite for the people to decide.
Because it
is not Juan Guaidó, nor the National Assembly, but the Venezuelan
people who must decide on the solution to be applied in Venezuela if
the regime insists on usurping power. We are promoting a Plebiscite
so that the force that only resides in the Depositary of Sovereignty
is pronounced before the world ordering those who usurp the power
that is only conferred by the will of the people, to hand it over in
favor of Juan Guaidó, who has been constitutionally designated as
President in Charge of the Republic on January 23, 2019. That is the
procedure we are promoting, NOT elections with those of us unknown as
power.
The
political parties that are now negotiating with the regime in Oslo
and now in Barbados have begun to use their communications machinery
to make Venezuelans believe that we only have the electoral path left
to resolve the crisis. And that solution, far from resolving it,
deepens it. And it deepens it because one of the fundamental pillars
that sustain the regime, and which has always been ignored by those
who have cohabited for years, has not yet been resolved: the
electoral system.
I
have stated it many times before, and I will affirm it again today:
THE AUTOMATIZED SYSTEM OF THE CNE OF THE REGIME CAN NO LONGER BE USED
TO COUNT THE VOTES OF THE VENEZUELANS. That it is not enough to
change the Rectors of the CNE, to update the Electoral Register, that
a complete re-engineering of the electoral system must be done BEFORE
MAKING ANOTHER ELECTION IN VENEZUELA! And that cannot be done with
the regime in Miraflores! Just reading the Sentence, File No.
SE-2018-001 of the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court of
Legitimate Justice in exile dated June 13, 2018, of which I had the
honor of being summoned as an expert technician (read Sentence in
Spanish, in
http://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/2018/06/tribunal-supremo-de-justicia-declara.html)
gives an account of the gravity of the situation of the Venezuelan
Electoral Power to the point that the High Court declared NULL the
use of the Automated Voting System for elections in Venezuela, which
merits a complete re-engineering of the Venezuelan Electoral Power.
Consequently,
any electoral solution in the terms proposed by the regime and the
official opposition does not constitute a way out of the crisis. One
must then turn to the very source from which the institutionality is
born, which is none other than Popular Sovereignty, where that
institutional cancer called CNE with all its machines and procedures
is totally excluded, and return to the very principle of counting the
votes one by one...
If the
International Community insists on an electoral solution, it is
because it recognises without a doubt that we must resort to Popular
Sovereignty and count the votes in order to resolve our differences.
But then we must convince them that we in Civil Society also believe
in this way but not in the terms proposed by the regime and the
official opposition. Convince them that a Plebiscite is also an
electoral mechanism but with the difference that it can place in the
hands of the people the transcendental decision to decide the
continuity of the regime, but by means of the votes, in a peaceful
and constitutional way, but supervised and without the intervention
of the institutions kidnapped by Maduro.
Going to an
election with the regime and its system implies that we tolerate its
existence after having unknown it and we give it political
belligerence by accepting the electoral results that come out of
those elections, with a system that we know is corrupted beforehand.
With a plebiscite in the terms stated here, it would not be like
that, and why not? Because it is precisely a matter of submitting to
the consideration of Original Popular Sovereignty the transcendental
decision about the very existence of the regime -whether we want it
or not-, with all that this implies, including its expulsion from the
political life of the country. Do you realize the difference?
But you may
ask yourselves, how to bring the regime to that judgment of the
sovereignty of the people? Obviously it is by no means easy. It is
clear that it will not wish to count itself vote by vote and in an
open and supervised way by the International Community, knowing that
it will lose the popular judgment. It is there where the external
pressure of all the friendly countries, especially that of the
Secretary General of the OAS, Luis Almagro, the government of the
United States, the governments of Colombia and Brazil, must begin to
be exercised with greater depth in order to force it to be counted in
those terms and not in others. The international community must be
the first to be convinced of this solution, increasing and deepening
the sanctions already applied, until the regime agrees to go to a
Plebiscite.
At the
moment, the countries that support us are pressing for sanctions, but
only for the regime to return on its own to respect for the
Constitution, something that has not happened and will not happen,
but which has undoubtedly affected them, with its consequent
weakening, without breaking the dictatorship. With the plebiscite
solution, pressure from the international community would be
concentrated on a single purpose: that the regime accepts to be
counted in a plebiscite. This would increase the pressure in a
decisive way because it would be a focused pressure directed to a
single and clear objective, and not to a diffuse and general one as
is happening now, giving a unified direction to the protests that
occur in Venezuela with a clear demand to the regime: that they be
counted in plebiscitary terms.
The
Plebiscite would be held with the collaboration of civil society and
the political parties that so decide, without the intervention of the
CNE, not only because it is corrupt to the core but also because this
instrument does not fall within its constitutional competence (Art.
70), so that its conduct would also be much more agile and immediate
than an election -as was demonstrated on 16J-2017-, always relying on
the support and supervision of international organizations (OAS and
EU). By increasing the pressure exerted from the outside to the
inside, and from the very bowels of the country, the regime will
begin to ask to "negotiate" the terms of its submission to
the will of the people. That is where the only possible
negotiation with them would begin: that of the terms of their exit.
But
how would it be done for the regime to comply with the outcome of
that Plebiscite? The answer to that question goes hand in hand with
the acceptance of the instrument: of not fulfilling the popular
mandate emanating from the ballot boxes of that Plebiscite,
the people would be giving the necessary legal basis to the world for
a humanitarian intervention to
enforce the Sovereign's decision, not having the International
Community any way to avoid the fulfillment of the Responsibility to
Protect (R2P) to Venezuela according to the terms conceived in the
General Assembly of the UN in 2005. And to achieve this in the most
expeditious manner and with the collaboration of the only legitimate
power in Venezuela, the National Assembly would have no more excuses
to refuse to approve the presence of foreign forces within the
country to support what the people decided in the plebiscite, through
its attribution established in the Constitution in Article 187,
numeral 11.
A
plebiscite is a solution that opposes negotiations with the regime by
an opposition determined to cohabit in order to ensure their
permanence in the structures of power. It would give continuity to
the promise made to Venezuelans on the 23E to put an immediate end to
usurpation.
However,
the plebiscite solution is not magic. It takes work and effort, both
nationally and internationally, to convince many people. The proposed
plebiscite is intrinsically much more than a mere popular
consultation, as it has been pretended to show in order to disqualify
it. It is the most expeditious mechanism to put an immediate end to
the suffering of the people, which politically expresses the best
strength we have against the regime and the one it fears, which are
not the weapons or the soldiers but the People's Sovereignty that
resides only in you. It is not the interim government of Juan Guaidó
that has the support of the world. The people of Venezuela are the
ones who have that support, and this has been repeated countless
times by the International Community. The only thing left for us to
do is to call on that people to speak out. I hope I have convinced
them to begin to do so...
Thank you
very much...
Maturín,
20 July 2019
Email:
luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
Twitter:@laguana
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