Certainly, a lot of water has flowed under the bridges since a group of Venezuelans began to talk, discuss, expose and write about the Constituent Assembly to re-found Venezuela. You cannot even imagine how good I felt when the Venezuelan Episcopal Conference, CEV, began to talk about Refounding the Nation, as I mentioned in my last note (see Refounding the Nation, in https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/p/refounding-nation.html), and especially when the institution that has seen governments rise and fall for more than two thousand years around the world, takes a transcendental step for Venezuelans to begin to address this issue.
And the fact is that it is not the same to talk about the Constituent Assembly in the times of Chávez, then in the times of Maduro -who by the way made his own Constituent Assembly- and now much less in the times of the Government in Charge or interim government. Because even though we are basically talking about the same thing, the approach to the country changes radically because the political contexts have changed in the same way. I invite you to take a brief tour.
When we began to raise this issue and the need for the country to fully understand that it was not by changing one president for another that we would get out of the structural problem we were facing, there was no international talk of a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela. Neither was there talk of a narco-tyranny, although there was talk of the drug business that Chávez had with the FARC guerrillas. But not beyond that, and it turned out to be something more than what was reproached to the authoritarianism of the Lieutenant Colonel President. There was still talk of "a bad government" that required Venezuelans to vote it out.
We were having a very bad time but there was still money in the streets and, in the opinion of the opposition country, the thing was not beyond making a good electoral campaign that would return Venezuela to its democratic path. We were "the Constituent madmen" who insisted that it was not enough to get rid of the one who had burst the institutional bases of the country with a Constituent in 1999, but that the country had to be re-founded on new bases, because what had happened before and what came after had put an end to the Venezuelan institutionality as we knew it, and a new one had to be built. It was necessary to apply the maxim that what was good for the turkey was also good for the kettle. I dedicated many notes to explaining this idea, which I condensed in a series of explanatory notes that may be interesting to divulge now (see in Spanish Doce Ejes y un Destino, in https://tinyurl.com/unbut4e9). This was later translated into our project The Big Change. (see in Spanish El Gran Cambio, Una propuesta para el país que queremos, in https://ancoficial.blogspot.com/p/documentos-fundamentales.html).
But that message had a very low sound for the Venezuelan society to hear. It was necessary to explain a lot and go against the institutional current of the parties that insisted on an electoral game in which they had no chance of regaining power in Venezuela. The warnings of those of us who said at that time, between 2011 and 2012, that there were no conditions in Venezuela to fight the regime for power in the electoral ballot box, went unheeded. Insisting on that path made no sense at all.
But the powerful machinery of the opposition parties was overwhelming. Anyone who raised his voice saying something different than going to vote with the regime, was considered a pariah by everybody. And so we went, and we gave the October 2012 elections to Hugo Chavez with a candidate who sent us to play pots and pans and dance salsa because according to his criteria there would be deaths in those marches to claim a fraud in the open. I would like to know if he has counted the dead, tortured and imprisoned people after that until today, where he still has the audacity, not to say the corresponding rudeness, to want to lead the opposition again. Does he think that Venezuelans are assholes? Somebody please bury this unburied corpse for good!
There was no meeting or place in Venezuela where we did not go to present the idea and with that "Coordinadora Democrática" and its representatives to present the proposal to use the Constitution to summon Hugo Chávez to a Constituent Assembly with 15% of the Electoral Registry in accordance with Article 348 of the Constitution. We went to those meetings as simple citizens empowered with an idea and a project for a country. How different it would have been if they had heeded that call! Venezuela would be a different country now. But the political context of that time indicated that it was useless to keep knocking on the doors of the parties to ask them to assume the Constituent Assembly issue. Until we realized that the only way was to assume it ourselves in the Civil Society and present it to the country. It was then that we founded Alianza Nacional Constituyente Originaria, ANCO.
At that time, we developed the necessary theory to summon the sovereign people through a signature collection process designed by ANCO and we traveled the country proposing this course of action, swearing in groups that were in agreement with the idea and which we called Juntas Activadoras del Poder Constituyente Originario, JAPCOs (Original Constituent Power Activating Boards). JAPCOs were sworn in all over the country. We gave talks, conferences, attended countless radio programs in the interior, selling a project of change and re-foundation of the country. But then the context changed: Maduro announced the convocation of a Constituent of the regime, on May 1st, 2017.
We could no longer continue collecting signatures for a Constituent Assembly, but to summon the people to a Popular Consultation to reject this call of the regime, where the very essence of this process was distorted by directly calling for constituent elections without the authorization of the people through a Consultative Referendum. This had been the procedure followed by Hugo Chávez in 1999 to call for the Constituent. Maduro summoned, accordingly, an illegitimate Constituent. From then on, everything else the regime did through that parapet was illegitimate.
The story of ANCO's involvement in the conduct of the 2017 Popular Consultation I have already told (see Return the people their primitive sovereignty, in https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_732.html and The original message, in https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/p/the-original-message.html) so I will not dwell again on those details. In that binding Consultation, Maduro's call for a Constituent Assembly on July 30, 2017 was rejected and unfortunately the authorities of the National Assembly ignored that mandate, abiding only by the appointment of the Magistrates of the TSJ, who ended up being persecuted and imprisoned by the regime. The opposition negotiated that Consultation for the regional elections of December 2017.
In spite of the accelerated decomposition of the country's institutionality that merited and continues to merit the calling of the Original Constituent Assembly, the regime continued to insist on the electoral route with the illegitimate CNE of the regime. On May 20, 2018, Maduro brought forward the presidential elections corresponding to December 2018 using an illegal CNE, reason why those elections were rejected nationally and internationally, as well as his illegitimate presidency.
ANCO continued insisting on the summoning of the Popular Sovereignty to endorse the path to be followed in the country for the Cessation of Usurpation. This path was finally accepted by the political sectors of the National Assembly and on September 7, 2020 the Unitary Pact for Freedom and Free Elections was signed by 37 opposition political parties, the last 4 being the parties that make up the G4. In that political context at the end of 2020 we were all moving in the same direction to make the International Community help us, with the mandate in hand of the sovereign people, to achieve the Cessation of Usurpation. Once the Usurpation had ceased, it was necessary to call a Constituent Assembly to re-found the country.
However, the political sector once again turned its back on the citizens who, in a number greater than 6.4 million Venezuelans, gave a mandate to be used worldwide in favor of stopping Maduro's usurpation. The parties returned to negotiate regional and presidential elections with the regime. And that is where they are now. The caretaker government is about to announce an agreement to go to elections with Maduro and in exchange he demands that the opposition asks the International Community to remove the sanctions against them. Maduro has managed to put the opposition to work for him! Venezuelans will not endorse this immorality or these elections, let alone go to them, and the International Community knows it, to the point that they will not withdraw these sanctions to a criminal and terrorist regime.
This state of moral and political decomposition has been reached. There is no legitimate representation from any of these negotiators, neither from the regime nor from the opposition, to solve Venezuela's terminal crisis. And in this context, the re-foundation of the Nation cannot wait a minute longer. The Interim and the opposition parties achieved with their repeated betrayal to the Venezuelans who gave two mandates, what the Venezuelans who promoted the Constituent process in Venezuela did not achieve for years: that the country and its Catholic Church demand to solve the crisis by summoning the people to Refound the Nation through a Constituent process. That the International Community begins to take note of this political turn of incalculable consequences. The elections should be to elect the legitimate representatives of the people to an Original National Constituent Assembly that will decide the destiny of Maduro and the country, with the sustained pressure of the International Community. The rest is a vacuum. And as you already know, there are no vacuums in nature and even less in politics...
Caracas, July 3, 2021
Blog: https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/
Email: luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
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