New Ecuadorian far-right president Daniel Noboa. Photo: Reuters.
By Clodovaldo Hernandez – Jan 13, 2024
What would become of right-wing governments and the imperial power that supports them if they could not trample on their own fundamental laws, norms, and principles?
Let’s think about democracy itself, about freedoms of thought, association, movement, speech, and protest. A slight review of history and current news will tell us that when the right has power and faces some type of setback, the first thing it does is limit these freedoms.
The supreme example of this is the international order represented by the United Nations and its paraphernalia of institutions and norms that are applied with extreme rigor to governments of the left or those that rebel against imperial power. These rules are overridden by the veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council. In this manner, Israel, the putative offspring of the United States in Western Asia. is exonerated from complying with even the most basic norms of international and humanitarian law.
At the internal level of each of the countries governed by the right—particularly if it one of the most retrograde forces regimes—this “freedom to ignore the rule of law” has been and continues to be a classic.
Venezuela’s history
Let’s look for a moment at the pages of Venezuela’s contemporary history: the Congress of the first period of democracy (1959-1964) took much longer to approve the new National Constitution (1961) than President Rómulo Betancourt did to suspend the citizen guarantees enshrined in it and govern under a regime of exception.
Betancourt, “the Father of Venezuelan democracy,” had already suspended the guarantees enshrined in the previous Magna Carta, in November 1960, ordering the troops to “shoot the bochincheros [protesters].”
The following governments of our exemplary democracy kept the guarantees in that state—suspended—and under the protection of this state of affairs they committed all manner of outrages against the guerrillas and against activists who were not up in arms, trade unionists, students, and anyone who was classified, at their discretion, as being “lazy or a thug.” But, of course, that is a topic that would involve a very long detour.
The issue of suspending guarantees had become an automatic gesture of the political system in Venezuela. According to some records, there were 21 decrees suspending guarantees between 1960 and 1998. Even the second government of Carlos Andrés Pérez (CAP), which came to power with the purpose of “modernizing” the country through neoliberal shock, before the end of its first month in office, had suspended guarantees, and the army began shooting at everything that moved during those nights of curfew. It was everyone for themselves.
Naturally, CAP also suspended them in 1992, when they were knocked down twice through military insurrections. In the days after February 4 of that year [the date of the failed insurrection led by Hugo Chávez], even the right to inform was restricted. Government-appointed censors were sent to media newsrooms, making decisions about what could and could not be printed.
The National Guild of Journalists and the National Union of Press Workers organized a one-day strike to denounce censorship. The editors (even those who assumed a stance of being very rebellious and hard-nosed) stood up to the Pérez government to prevent the strike. Several unions, union delegates, and leaders were fired for having participated in that protest. This will be part of the history of Venezuelan journalism at the end of the 20th century if anyone dares to write it.
Even the distinguished constitutionalist Rafael Caldera resorted to the suspension of guarantees and decreed a state of emergency in June 1994 to face the banking crisis that CAP, his neoliberal geniuses, and his cronies in the financial sector had left as a poisonous inheritance.
Even during the two moments in which the right has returned to power in post-1999 Venezuela (in very different ways, of course), a scorched earth has been its goal. Such was the case with the infamous decree of Pedro Carmona of April 12, 2002, which swept away all public powers, and such was the case in 2016 when the right-wing opposition took control of the National Assembly and, first, sought to overthrow the constitutional government in six months and, later, to “govern” from Parliament and through self-swearing in. That is what the opposition is still doing, incidentally.
Violence in Ecuador Is Result of Deliberate Dismantling of the State
Meanwhile, during the years of Chavismo, there have been no suspension of civil guarantees, not even during coup attempts, failed assassinations, foreign invasion attempts, blackouts, guarimbas, and miscreant rebellions. Let the record reflect this.
A look at the neighborhood
Let us review what has happened and is happening in other countries governed by the right. Perhaps there is no more sublime expression (it is irony, in this case) of the states of exception than George W. Bush’s Patriot Act after the increasingly suspicious attack on the Twin Towers.
This “legislation” (which contravenes its own Constitution and the entire federal and state legal system) allowed the United States elite to start several wars and invasions, resulting in millions of deaths and irreparable destruction of entire countries. It also served to violate the human rights of thousands of people illegally taken into custody and brought to illegal prisons such as Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, where they were and continue to be tortured and humiliated in the most shameful ways. Likewise, the Patriot Act and all its derivatives have served to crush any internal dissidence against democracy that is sold to the world as a paradigm. If someone protests against police violence or any other of the iniquities of US society, they only have to be accused of being a terrorist, and they can end up behind bars for life.
Let us now land in more recent times and see how states of emergency, exceptions, or whatever they are called in each country, have been used to repress protests in Chile, Ecuador, and Colombia, without any of the far-right presidents of those countries being even gently reprimanded by the diplomatic community, much less by the global press who are so easily inclined to describe other leaders as genocidal or as criminals.
This benevolent attitude has also protected the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, because if any left-wing or slightly progressive president had implemented a security policy similar to his, he would have already been stigmatized as a perpetrator of serious violations of human rights, particularly of prisoners.
But, let us get to the most current issue. The Decree of Necessity and Urgency (DNU) of Argentine President Javier Milei is such a complete compendium of arbitrariness against other public powers that it seems that it was copied from Pedro Carmona’s edict. However, in the diplomatic and media spheres there is no condemnation, not even slight questioning of these actions, because Milei is today one of the darlings of the empire and the Latin American oligarchies. If he manages to impose his ultra-neoliberal, paleocapitalist, and proclaimed “libertarian” plan, he will be the model to follow for the rest of the continent. It is not surprising that, along with the deeply anti-popular economic package, he is escalating state repression through draconian regulations that seek to criminalize any protest.
And so we come to Ecuador, where the right has governed for the last seven years, but where Rafael Correa (execrated by the political system throughout that time) is held responsible [by the mainstream and Western media] for what is happening in terms of security.
The events that occurred led, as is customary, to the declaration of a state of emergency and the granting of broad permissions for the actions of public forces.
Beyond the controversy over some of the incidents that triggered the measure, it is clear that the very recent government of Daniel Noboa now has the opportunity to impose, just as Milei tries to do in Argentina, what some analysts call post-democracy with the authoritarianism of the market, in which any dissident of the policies of economic adjustment (and exclusion of the ideological adversary) can be imprisoned, fined and, above all, mocked through the media machinery.
We could go into much more detail on this topic, but we have already seen enough examples that right-wing governments need to break principles, constitutions, and laws to survive in their vaunted democracies. They need it and they have the license to do it.
It is a serious warning for those who still believe that reactionary forces will behave with any respect if they return to power in a country like Venezuela, which has been a thorn in the side of hegemonic elements for a quarter of a century.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/SL
Clodovaldo Hernández
Venezuelan journalist and writer. He writes regularly for La IguanaTV, Supuesto Negado, and Mision Verdad.
