Speech at the Carabobo National Refoundation Forum
November 15, 2021
Good afternoon,
My name is Luis Manuel Aguana and I belong to the Board of Directors of the Alianza Nacional Constituyente Originaria ANCO, and I will be speaking to you in the next few minutes about our proposal The Great Change. It was Dr. Rosa Maria Zulueta, Social Psychologist and Venezuelan extraordinaire (see in Spanish Rosa María Zulueta, ciudadana integral, en https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/2017/03/rosa-maria-zulueta-ciudadana-integral.html) from whom I first heard the term "The Great Change". Dr. Zulueta accompanied us in ANCO throughout the country during the last years of her life in our educational crusade, as the teacher she was, in our permanent attempt to tell whoever would listen to us about the transformations that Venezuela needs in its entirety; she said that Venezuela not only needed a political change but a Great Change, the most important of all and a fundamental requirement for a country of the future: a change in the Venezuelans themselves and the necessary effort to become citizens. Today I honor his memory more than 4 years after his departure.
Dr. Zulueta's specialty obliged her to permanently explain the affectation to which the population has been subjected because of a "revolution" that, according to her diagnosis, made Venezuela sick. Rosa Maria said that the regime had deliberately applied a strategy made up - in her own words - of "violent speeches, intolerance, blackmail and manipulation, deceit and blame bouncing, human rights violations, political discrimination, inefficiency, corruption and poverty".
According to Dr. Zulueta, this strategy of domination had produced in us "logical breakdowns, hopelessness, helplessness, uncertainty, frustration, resentment, toxic rage, paranoia and reactivity". And as a consequence of all this, sick Venezuelans felt the most perverse effects: "evasion, procrastination, habituation, resignation and paralysis". And that this made us sabotage ourselves with these three weapons of destruction: "Fear, psychological resistance to change and distrust".
And I am going to dwell on the latter. These three elements are more present than ever in today's Venezuela, especially THE PSYCHOLOGICAL RESISTANCE TO CHANGE. We give ourselves thousands of excuses to continue believing that the solutions that continue to be proposed to the serious crisis we are suffering is to continue doing the same thing: elections, dialogues and political cohabitation, naturally closing the door and understanding to any other solution.
What is the foundation of The Great Change? The one Dr. Zulueta mentioned: TO TURN VENEZUELANS INTO CITIZENS. And according to our studied criteria, this happens politically by EMPOWERING THEM, that is, giving them the power and full responsibility for their own destiny. And what does this mean? Let's see:
If the prevailing paradigm in our fundamental Social Pact, the Constitution, is structured in such a way that it is the State who distributes and distributes, and who decides how much and in what way to give citizens their share of the country's income, conceptually what we are doing is creating a country of servants.
This paradigm conditions a Pact where there is someone who gives and someone who receives, regardless of the portions that are distributed. This scheme in itself generates a fierce struggle for power - read the political parties we know - who feel they have the right to distribute, and generally end up doing so for their own benefit. In this way, it is in the hands of those who distribute to provide citizen welfare, and the exercise of the administration of the State, perverting the fundamental object of its own raison d'être, which is none other than to provide quality of life to citizens, generating corruption and corrupt elites. Such a scheme can only work as long as there is enough to go around, and as we know, this is no longer the case in Venezuela. This paradigm is structurally toxic and destructive, and unsustainable in the long term for any society. We Venezuelans are living proof of that.
And that is what is structured in the current Constitution and in the previous one, and the one before that. Venezuela is no longer an oil producing country. We stopped living from the sale of an internationally tradable good. Now we live on the remittances of the more than 6 million Venezuelans who have migrated forcibly. No one could live in this country on the devalued salaries in bolivars of this or any future government. The stone age did not end because the stones ceased to exist.
Venezuelans will never be able to empower themselves if there is no Great Change in the current Social Pact, which is already completely outdated and does not correspond to the reality we have been living for many years. And at this point you may ask, what changes are we talking about? We are talking about building a new paradigm to replace the current one and to make a fundamental shift towards a productive Venezuela. And what would this paradigm be? I will briefly describe some characteristics that should be taken into account as a reference. This list is not exhaustive and even less limiting:
* There must be important changes in the legislative control of the Executive Power. It can no longer be tolerated that any President of the Republic can do whatever he wants with the Venezuelan people and the Public Treasury. No President can create or eliminate Ministries or manage budgets at will, or remove us from international Agreements without the consent of the representation of the people established in a Parliament. Their power must be reduced, cut up and handed over to the Municipalities and States, establishing a new Federal Pact. A 180 degree turn is required in the reallocation of political power, finances and wealth generation;
* The representation of the States in Parliament must be reestablished. That is, to reinstate the Senate of the Republic and give it full control over the promotions of the Armed Forces and the final approval of laws. This cannot continue to be in the hands of any President of the Republic, regardless of the political sign;
* Municipalities and States must have the economic and political capacity to provide the quality of life demanded by their citizens. Power must be brought as close as possible to the citizen and this is only possible by inverting the pyramid of power established in the constitutional structure. The autonomy of the States and Municipalities must be established as soon as possible, so that the citizens can take control of their destiny in every corner of Venezuela, and the creation of a Federal Pact of the States;
* The States must rethink through their own Constitutions how many Municipalities they should have according to their population reality, starting by immediately converting the current Parishes into Municipalities. It is not possible to continue living with a citizen reality of 335 Municipalities throughout the country and expect good public services or a better administration of them with quality of life. For example, Carabobo must urgently rethink its internal population reality. The Parish of Miguel Peña, belonging to the Municipality of Valencia had 371,087 inhabitants for the 2011 Census, much more than the State of Cojedes (323,165) and twice as many as the Delta (165,525). The Parroquia Mariara of the Diego Ibarra Municipality (66,084) had for that 2011 Census more inhabitants than the Chacao Municipality of Caracas (61,213). Only Valencia had for the 2011 Census more inhabitants than the State of Barinas (816,264): 829,856. With this reality of a territorially distorted country, what Mayor or Governor of any political party can solve anything with the budget allocated to the municipalities and the States?
* By redefining the role of the States and Municipalities, the nineteenth century figure of the Situado Constitucional must disappear because each State must contribute, not be contributed, to a federal fund established in a Pact that supports services common to the whole Republic, such as the Armed Forces and the Foreign Service. Did you know that in 2016 only 3.67% of the National budget went to the Municipalities of the country, and 14.71% went to the administration of the States, with the National Executive reserving 81.61%? And that similar figures have been repeated for more than 60 years, the 40 years of the Punto Fijo Pact and the 20 years of Castro-Chavismo-Madurism? Tell me which Mayor can do something with that to improve the daily life of his citizens? According to Article 167.4 of the Constitution: "...The Situado is an item equivalent to a maximum of twenty percent of the total annual Estimated Revenues of the National Treasury...". This is a situation that the States cannot continue to tolerate;
* The oil industry must be thoroughly rethought and new terms for the distribution of income must be established, which are completely different from the current ones. The industry must belong to Energy and each State must control at all levels its own resources, including oil and mining resources, establishing its contributions to a federal fund. If it has more it will contribute more to the Federal Pact;
* An URGENT change is required in the criteria for citizen representation in Parliament. Deputies should be real representatives of their States, not of the parties they belong to. The representation of the States in Parliament should come from the Legislative Assemblies and rotate throughout the legislative period. The dictatorship of the parties over our popular representatives must be broken. The parties would only have the option of popular representation for the positions of Deputies, Governors and Presidents of the Republic. It is proposed that Mayors and Councilmen be exclusively from the sphere of Civil Society;
* Education, Justice, Health and public safety should be at the level of the States and Municipalities, with common national guidelines. Water and electricity should be locally controlled and guaranteed services;
These are just some of the characteristics of a new paradigm that must be established to empower citizens and become the fundamental basis of a new Social Pact. This is the only way for citizens to control power from the grassroots, allowing the country's 23 federal entities to independently develop their own productive potential. Clearly not all the proposed changes are here and some of them are ideas that should be discussed and improved in this rethinking of the country among all and we invite you to do so in the document we have published.
To conclude, have you noticed that any political factor in Venezuela has even raised these transcendental issues that would affect our lives in the future, in this tragic hour when we are all crying because the country is destroyed, our children have died or have fled from this reality? No, right? They are all asking to go back to the past, through a "government program" and for Maduro to leave any way he can to go to elections immediately, hoping to go back to the "business as usual" of a "take you off to put me on" after a devastated Venezuela. This is not a change, it is more of the same but with other protagonists, and worst of all, to solve absolutely NOTHING for Venezuelans. Join us and help us to make this citizen crusade of The Great Change for Venezuela. God knows what is good for all of us... "We have to RETHINK VENEZUELA. We have to REINVENT DEMOCRACY among all of us. We have to REFOUND THE COUNTRY"....
Thank you very much....
Caracas, November 15, 2021
Blog: https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/
Email: luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
Twitter:@laguana
Instagram: @laguana01
Telegram: https://t.me/TICsDDHH
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