By Luis Manuel Aguana
Ever since that famous question was asked
"Civil Society, how do you eat that?", Venezuelan Civil Society has
gone around in circles to serve as a counterweight to the barbarities committed
by both the regime and the official opposition during this period of
obscurantism in Venezuela's history.
In a
recent earlier note (The Civil Opposition present, in https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_92.html), I remembered a term that
I coined in the year 2012, which went beyond the well-known Civil Society that
all Venezuelans know, and which I baptized Civil Opposition:
"The Civil Opposition is civil society in
its role as the protagonist of change, and its action in public affairs is
manifested in its active participation and control of the main public actors.
It will always be in opposition and will permanently remind those actors that
there is an anonymous country that is affected by the decisions and public
policies that are applied to citizens. They are the ordinary people who do not
belong to parties but are conscious citizens who live in and love their
country, NGOs that have their own civil spaces, opinion makers without ties or
straw ends, who are day by day doing their bit to ensure that things are done
well. If this decisive participation had existed before, perhaps things would
not have gone so far and Chávez would not exist in the Venezuelan political
scene" (see in
Spanish Oposición Civil, in https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/2012/08/oposicion-civil.html).
Within the framework of this Civil
Opposition, the National Original Constituent Alliance, ANCO, has acted so that
the political protagonists understand that given the extremely serious
institutional situation in which Venezuela finds itself, it was, is, and
continues to be necessary to concur with Popular Sovereignty to produce the
changes that this country needs, not only that of expelling Maduro and his
criminals from power. Politicians have been deaf to this principled approach.
First, in the face of the call for a National Constituent Assembly that we have
made for many years when we called ourselves a Constituent Movement, and from
2016 with the founding of ANCO. In the same way later with our proposal of a
Popular Plebiscitary Consultation.
It has never been our proposal to replace the
role of the political parties as the Civil Opposition. The parties in Venezuela
-the new ones and the old ones, all of them- lost their democratic course more
than 20 years ago. There is not a single political party in Venezuela that has
renewed its leadership in internal democratic elections and offered a
structural solution to solve the country's problems, beyond putting the faces
of its leaders up for an election. They are all hollow. That is why the Civil
Opposition has been present in its different manifestations and that is why we
founded ANCO.
But that doesn't solve the problem. The Civil
Opposition, unless its leaders accompany the current political parties in their
claims to power by power itself, cannot by definition replace the role of the
political parties, however horrible their performance may have been. The
current parties have the obligation to modify their way of acting in front of
the country or to perish in front of other new ones that effectively vibrate in
the same frequency of the citizenship. And the quarry from where these new parties
will come out is, again, the Civil Society in its main role of social control
of the parties and the rulers that come out of them.
If we don't like something the parties do,
let's report it. Let us constantly insist and criticize their actions even more
in the face of their public responsibilities. But Civil Society does not
exercise the power to make decisions. We only mobilize ourselves with
activities and exert pressure so that they act in the way that we believe
convenient for the interests of the country. And if we still don't get them to
do what we think they should do, then there will be no other choice but to
participate directly in public affairs, taking a step forward and creating new
parties that do respond to what the people want, soliciting the vote of the
citizens to do ourselves what those leaders we criticize do not want to do in
favor of the people. That's how the system
works.
The behaviour of the political parties in
Venezuela has left much to be desired. In 1998 the bipartisanship as we knew it
until that year disappeared. Many of those rotten leaders of the old destroyed
parties migrated to that new platform that Chavez formed to change the
institutionality of our country. And those who survived decided to cohabit with
the regime in order to survive. We are now seeing the results of that. We have
seen in these 20 years that this experiment did not solve but rather aggravated
the disease that Venezuela was already bringing, which caused precisely one
coup leader to be elected President of the Republic. And although other parties
emerged with new faces, even very young ones, they unfortunately followed the
experience and bad habits of the old ones. And why was this the case? Because
the truly concerned citizens have never wanted to take the step of joining the
old parties to renew them, or creating new ones to propose solutions for the
population, remaining on the sidewalk of Civil Society, and so things did not
change for the Venezuelans either.
When from ANCO, as a Civil Society organization,
we requested a Popular Plebiscite Consultation as a tool to remove the regime,
what we were basically proposing was to generate in practice the constitutional
mandate of a people towards those who have roles in public power to change the
political situation. That was the only way that from the Civil Society we could
make them do what we asked. When they did not achieve this, they continued to
do what they thought was appropriate in their role as
"representatives" that we gave them with our vote. Those are the rules of the democratic game.
The effort that distinguished Venezuelans are
making to put "representatives" to the country's Civil Society
through innovative mechanisms based on social networks, is a modern approach to
shape this concern of mobilizing Civil Society in its role of social control of
what political parties and their leaders do, But never the representatives that
are elected through those mechanisms could replace those who were legitimately
elected with votes in the National Assembly or any other public power of the
current Venezuelan institutions, so we are very upset because at this time they
are not fulfilling their role as representatives. They have lost legitimacy of
exercise and that is why from ANCO we fight to structurally change the way
those representatives exercise our public representation, for a modern and
different way where the citizens can exercise their control. And that is part
of our proposal in the Big Change.
I welcome all initiatives that try to
organize Civil Society in some way but without diverting the current and future
role it should have in emerging from this crisis. There is no single Civil
Society, just as there is no representation of humanity because we are human
beings with different expressions. There will be multiple expressions of the
citizens who will have their legitimate representations and all of them will be
equally very valid and must continue and be strengthened; because if there is
something that we have gained in these last 20 years in Venezuela it is the
citizen conscience that our lives and the quality in how we live them depends
on the deficient or efficient exercise of the activity of the politicians who
represent us. That our role as citizens in the public life of the country
manifested in a strong Civil Opposition must go beyond exercising a vote
periodically. And because we have not done so is the reason why we are in this
very serious situation. Let us not let them take away from us this new citizen
condition we have acquired after so much sacrifice, making it felt for what
will happen now and in the future of Venezuela.
Caracas, April 27, 2020
Email: luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
Twitter:@laguana
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