Contrary to what many believe, the principles that sustain what is known today as Human Rights in the world, were not born with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations Organization (UN), on December 10, 1948, and not even from the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, previously approved in Bogotá on April 30, 1948, in the Ninth Pan-American Conference, with the creation of the Organization of American States, OAS.
The fundamental principles of Human Rights that exist today had their origin in the National Constituent Assembly approved in France on August 26, 1789, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The principles of liberty and equality among men, sovereignty, presumption of innocence, freedom of expression, accountability, separation of powers, private property were established in that historic document and are defended today by humanity (see Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, in https://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/sites/default/files/as/root/bank_mm/espagnol/es_ddhc.pdf).
France's National Constituent Assembly of 1789 was the first of its kind in the world and was born a few weeks after the historic storming of the Bastille. “On July 14, 1789, the citizens of Paris seized the Bastille prison, symbolically marking the beginning of the French Revolution and the end of monarchical absolutism, sustained by the doctrine of the divine origin of royal authority.” The fundamental pillar on which that Constituent was sustained in France was the work of Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès entitled, “What is the Third Estate?”, “a document against privilege that is key to explaining both the advent of the bourgeois class to power and the doctrine of the constituent power of the people” (see El Historiador, in Spanish The Abbé Sieyès and the French Revolution, in https://elhistoriador.com.ar/el-abate-sieyes-y-la-revolucion-francesa/).
Why do I make this historical reference? Because in Venezuela we find ourselves in a situation of complete political anomie, as France was in 1789, which motivated the structural changes that followed. In France, the nobility (including the King) was called the 1st State, the clergy the 2nd State, and the people, who with their work supported the rest of the States, the 3rd State. The same reasons that made the monarchy of Louis XVI fall in 1789 are present in the Venezuela of 2025, with a political class that rules the country with characteristics similar to those of the nobility of France in 1789: corrupt and profiteers of the rest of the country, with a 2nd Estate that today does not have the political incidence it had in the world of that time.
Those who were not in the nobility or the clergy - the 3rd Estate - comprised 98% of the population and “... lacked political power and decision. On him fell the hardest jobs. They had no rights and paid all the taxes. The tax levies of the peasants came to absorb up to 70 percent of the income”. Keeping the distances, the picture could not be more similar and desolating, comparable to the one we have in Venezuela today.
The participants of the 1st. State, the nobility, who held political power, squandered all the wealth of the country in wars “which meant the loss of most of its overseas possessions and the exhaustion of resources”.... “In this climate of social effervescence, during the last months of 1788 and the first months of the following year, an infinite number of writings appeared in France aimed at challenging the existing order, but none made such an impression as the pamphlet of Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, one of the most enlightened representatives of the Third Estate” (see previous note from El Historiador, in https://elhistoriador.com.ar/el-abate-sieyes-y-la-revolucion-francesa/).
The only war that has taken place in Venezuela in the present century has been the war of the regime of Hugo Chávez Frías and Nicolás Maduro Moros against the population to change our political model. That war has ruined the country and has left the opposition political sector completely defenseless to act in favor of the citizens. There is currently no force of what was called political representation, for that 3rd Venezuelan State, to be able to change the state of affairs in the country. But that does not mean that a 3rd State in Venezuela does not exist and cannot be manifested.
After more than 2 centuries of Constitutional experience, the world evolved, but Venezuela forgot its own origins. Two referential Constitutional processes in the 20th century, the one of 1946-1947, which established our Civil and Political Rights, and the one of 1961, which gave us peaceful coexistence after a tyranny, closed the last century in peace. But in these 26 years we regressed Constitutionally, destroying the federal bases of our birth certificate of 1811, handing over all power to another tyrant with a new Constitution in 1999.
The war that has arisen in an attempt to correct this mess has ruined us all, and in the process all the institutional bases that make us a functional country in the eyes of the community of nations have disappeared. It is urgent to recover in Venezuela the principles that sustained the first Constituent Assembly in the world.
It was not necessary to resort to a constitutional text, or any previous regulation that indicated to the French, and also shortly after inspired by them, to the provinces of what later became known as the United States of America, that a people aware of their situation should get together and decide on a course of action to become a Nation to face their problems. All it took was common sense and a great deal of democratic creativity, and the initiative for this did not necessarily come from the political class, but from the living forces of society.
At a similar point in 2014, the Pío Tamayo Chair of the UCV, coordinated by Dr. Agustín Blanco Muñoz, coined the concept of Street Constituent to this request that was being made by the group that would be known 2 years later as the National Constituent Alliance, ANCO.
The precise legal interpretation was given to us at that time by Dr. José Vicente Haro, at that time President of the Venezuelan Association of Constitutional Law, who explained the concept very simply in an interview on the program “Toque de Queda”, which was broadcast by journalist José Domingo Blanco, Mingo, on EUTv, a program that was later closed by the regime. However, I rescued this important testimony for posterity (see in Spanish, Constituyente de Calle, Toque de Queda, EUTv with Mingo, in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoygzadEA1g).
I indicated in a note I published at that time that, according to Dr. Haro's explanation, “Either we make a Constituent Assembly based on the procedures established in the 1999 Constitution and we obligatorily go through all the paths established therein (CNE, TSJ and other invaded Powers), or we make a Constituent Assembly without following that path, just as the French people and the American people did more than 200 years ago when they founded their respective nations. That is, summoning the people to the streets to deliberate and reconstruct themselves, asking them, for example, if the development model they want is that of the Castro brothers”. That is what this whole discussion is about (see in Spanish Constituyente de Calle, en https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/2014/02/constituyente-de-calle.html).
We have grown in experience and application of that concept since then, which in its most basic form is the one explained by Dr. José Vicente Haro, but understood after many years of political misunderstanding, have ended up establishing that it is society as a whole, AND NOT ONLY ITS POLITICAL SECTOR, who must mobilize to achieve that precious objective of being able to convene to reestablish the lost constitutional order.
This must also be understood by those who exercise the government, as well as by those who sustain it, even if this appreciation is not yet assimilated or shared by all, because that is precisely what a constituent process is all about. Either we sit down to negotiate this process, or Venezuela will not return to political normality, with economic, political and social growth and development. The other way is the extermination of the opposition. And that is what the political factors in dispute have tried and continue to try to do, without any of them succeeding. And I do not believe that any of them will if they have not succeeded in more than 20 years.
This is the quintessence of the Proclamation made by ANCO on May 2, 2025, entitled “Towards a Constituent Negotiation”, which should not and cannot pass under the table of any sector of the life of the country, nor of those who from outside wish the welfare of Venezuelans. (see in Spanish ANCO Proclamation: Towards a Constituent Negotiation, in https://ancoficial.blogspot.com/2025/05/proclama-anco-hacia-una-negociacion.html). We do not defend the 1999 Constitution from an unconstitutional reform. We defend our inalienable human right, proclaimed since 1789, to remake an unjust Social Pact that has led us to an undeclared war among us. This understanding would help, instead of harming, to materialize a solution that is nothing more than trying to coexist after a war, which unfortunately we are now tragically losing, all Venezuelans...
Caracas, May 6, 2025
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