By Ana Cristina Bracho
The month of November has arrived, and not of any year, but of the last one that corresponds to the constitutional period that Comandante Chavez initiated and was exercise, almost entirely, by President Maduro. In this affirmation there is a true feat of the Venezuelan people that managed to hold firm after three attempts of “revolution of colors” that tried to turn into authentic and open civil wars. Unprecedented international harassment. Financial blockades and economic war.
In this context and having been elected in May of the current year Nicolás Maduro Moros as President of the Republic for the constitutional period that begins in January 2019, the opposition returns to the scheme of his famous “D Days” that they used in the past to affirm that, until there, not a minute more, the Chavism in power will last.
Perhaps, as this has already happened several times, we could feel ourselves like inside the fable of “Pedro and the Wolf”, or dedicate ourselves to look at the absurdity of an opposition that says they dismissed the President for leaving office, then judged him for whatever other reason, and since 2015 affirms that they do not recognize him because -according to their speeches- he has less popular support than them.
Therefore, it can be reasonable to believe that nothing will happen but the same show from an increasingly empty and irrelevant National Assembly and a couple of international declarations that as soon as they arrive, are forgotten.
However, there are some elements to consider. The first is that there is an electoral event on the agenda on which they can aspire to build a discourse that tries to delegitimize the President, based on the fact that municipal elections are historically the processes with the highest rate of abstention and that they are experts in declaring that any electoral event has a plebiscitary effect on Chavismo, and in the last times all the questioning has been not in the difference of votes among the participants, but in the size of the abstention.
Secondly, we must see how they can try to play with the legal categories based on the provisions of the Constitution and the factual situation in which they are now. Thus, the National Assembly is currently in an anomalous legal situation, because their actions are null by provision of the Constitutional Chamber [Supreme Court] that has punished the contempt of that Power to the orders emanated from the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court.
However, contempt is a factual situation that can be reversed. In fact, the Judicial Branch has urged the Legislative Power to correct its attitude and disincorporate the questioned deputies of Amazonas. The National Assembly has not done so because it is a point of honor for them to ignore the magistrates that make up the Supreme Court of Justice, to the point of swearing in another structure that operates outside the country [and also because their legal situation plays perfectly in favor of their continuated Coup strategy].
But if this changes, if the National Assembly deems it more convenient to put itself right and decide to get out of contempt, it could try to declare an absolute vacancy as they are insinuating and generate a different situation, which could be used to advance their destabilization agendas.
We may think that if that was the game, they could have done it at any time since 2015, but that is not the case. This is because the Constitution divides the effects of the President’s vacancy based on the time of the constitutional period in which it occurs.
So far, the opposition National Assembly has lived with a President who was in the final phase of his term when, should his absence take place, the Vice President of the Republic must assume power, while from January 10 they will meet with a President who begins his term and who, if his absence occurs, must be filled by the Head of the National Assembly, in accordance with the provisions of the Magna Carta.
An important aspect is to remember that any reading that we do in the present of the Venezuelan State, must consider that the Constituent Power is active, that it serves as the father of all Public Power and this does not disappear, like contempt, because the National Assembly demonstrates having a purpose of amendment of his stubborn decision of recent years. Therefore, we may see a new form of interrelation of the powers where the Constituent Power will be vital to guarantee the peace of the Republic and the stability of the State.
Maybe this is why January 10 is their new “D-Day”, about which they already claim to have the concert of other nations and some international structures that have declared to disregard the National Constituent Assembly. While this does not make any sense because the legitimacy of the elections is not measured from outside but within a country, they will redouble the battery to indicate that the only authority they recognize is the National Assembly. The debates we have seen around the opposition, where some spokesmen advocate a new scheme of relationships and understandings, may be related to that if this were the way they want to use in 2019, it will be vital again -for those who want to lead the opposition- to have control over the Presidency of the National Assembly.
If this is legally possible, it may be the cause for which there has been so much turmoil in recent days to determine who is the real leader and what is the current center of gravitation of the opposition, which some consider is in fact no longer located in the national territory.
For these reasons, we have to be aware of the level at which we are, because, as in April 2002, the coming weeks will demand the conscious defense of the revolutionary process, noting the internal situation and external risks, when as soon as the electoral chapter in the United States was closed, we saw Donald Trump taking extremely strong measures against the Iranian people.
We, who make up the millions of historical votes of Chavism and those who led Nicolás Maduro back to the Presidency for the future presidential term, have to look at the scenarios that lie ahead, since these moves would be equivalent to those that brought Fernando Lugo or Dilma Rousseff of power in their respective countries, with an aggravating circumstance: neither their peoples had been so attacked and weakened, nor the international community prepared to understand the no-recognition of the popular will electorally expressed as democratic facts, as it has been in the case of Venezuela.
Source URL: Mision Verdad
Translated by JRE
