President Nicolás Maduro has called a national emergency in Venezuela to combat corruption “at its roots”, for which he is seeking special powers.
Maduro has not clarified exactly what these special powers might be but in order to begin a decidedly vague “process to reform laws and change institutions” he must mean the enabling law which his predecessor and mentor, the late president Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) habitually pushed through a pliant national assembly in order to gain stretches of 18 months in which to rule by decree on the pretext of responding to a specific crisis. “If it’s necessary to change all the laws, we’ll do it”, Maduro said at a ceremony in the capital Caracas to mark International Youth Day.
Maduro is ever keen to emulate Chávez and his much-trumpeted crusade against corruption provides him with the ostensible reason to seek an enabling act. Indeed, he made his announcement shortly after confessing that he has slept “on several occasions” in Chávez’s mausoleum when he wants to reflect on matters.
As things stand, the ruling Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV) is just short of the three-fifths majority required to confer these special powers on Maduro. The PSUV and allies have 98 seats in the 165-seat national assembly. They need 99. Moves already seem to be afoot to gain the requisite extra vote: for instance, former PSUV deputy María Mercedes Aranguren, now aligned with the opposition Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD), could soon see her immunity lifted. The national assembly recommended on 2 July that the supreme tribunal (TSJ) investigate whether there are sufficient grounds to lift her immunity for alleged corruption. Aranguren’s alternate, crucially, is still loyal to the PSUV.
The MUD leader, Henrique Capriles Radonski, insists that corruption in Venezuela is most pronounced at the top of the Bolivarian food chain but the anti-corruption drive is not targeting these untouchables: the 50 people arrested in recent weeks were all junior officials and there has been no attempt to overhaul an arcane currency exchange system which helps perpetuate corruption. The opposition is also convinced that the corruption drive is a deliberate attempt to knock out MUD candidates, preventing them from competing in December’s municipal elections by smearing them with trumped up charges.
Government overhaul - from bourgeois to popular
The day before Maduro announced the national emergency, the former Chavista minister-turned-journalist, José Vicente Rangel, wrote in his weekly ‘El Espejo’ column in the daily Últimas Noticias that in vindicating the legacy of his predecessor President Maduro was also loyal to the need for an “accurate cut” in this “illness” afflicting Venezuelan society so as to prevent “the collapse of the Republic”. Rangel went on to call for “a national debate to determine responsibilities, arbitrate legal and political cases, effective popular participation and social control”. These measures, he said, were a necessary democratic and legal response to flush out those doubling up as “politicians and delinquents”.
As if in response, Maduro also declared that he intended to carry out “a process of restructuring of the national executive” in order to make it less corrupt, more efficient and better in tune with ‘popular power’”. Maduro said the Bolivarian Revolution had inherited the structure of a ‘bourgeois government’ and needed a new structure, whereby the ministries become focused on “attention to popular power”.
In stressing the importance of ‘popular power’, Maduro is at once being loyal to the legacy of Chávez and is also trying to consolidate his own fragile political support and legitimacy ahead of his first electoral test in December’s municipals, which the opposition is deliberately spinning as a plebiscite on the Maduro administration.
The preamble to Venezuela’s 1999 constitution establishes as its “supreme end”, “the re-founding of the Republic to establish a democratic, participatory and protagonist society”. Popular power, or ‘people power’, was seen by Chávez as a form of direct democracy, a sort of umbilical link between the executive and the people, as organised in thousands of local communal councils. Under Chávez’s never-fully-realised ‘geometry of powers’, first unveiled in 2007, the Venezuelan State, currently organised as a federal territory, would be re-founded and divided into five or six main ‘regions’, each run by a regional ‘president’ appointed by the president, with communes — councils comprising delegates elected from the grassroots communal councils — sitting underneath.
Chávez saw in communal power a way to improve efficiency and transparency in the delivery of the Revolution’s social policies. He never managed to see through his ambition to permanently institutionalise communal power. But Maduro has signalled his intent to follow through with the ‘transition to Socialism’ in Venezuela.
According to Aristóbulo Istúriz, a Chavista elected governor of Anzoátegui in December 2012: “The characteristics of the state, and the public powers of the state, should be transferred to the communes. That is why we speak of a Communal State. I don’t agree with the disappearance of the [state] governor, which should give support and offer the tools to [help] advance the transformation of the state, but the resources and competencies should be transferred to the commune”. In other words, state governors and mayors may not cease to exist, but their roles may be reduced to a mere administrative level, including transferring funds from the central government to the communes.
The opposition leader, Henrique Capriles Radonski, warns that people power amounts to nothing more than a power grab by a central government that “talks about popular power, confusing it with a political party”. Marina Corina Machado, one of the most outspoken members of the opposition, describes the concept of a communal State as “dictatorial Communism”.
- “Absolute impunity”
The coordinator of the NGO Observatorio Venezolano de la Violencia (OVV), Roberto Briceño León, accused the Maduro government of overseeing the “anarchisation” of Venezuelan society and said there was “absolute impunity” in the country. Briceño said that the OVV projected the total number of homicides in the country at some 25,000 this year, up from its estimate of some 22,000 last year (the government put it at a lower 16,000 for 2012). Briceño added that Venezuela needed to be “pacified”, which requires dialogue and the implementation of the rule of law. Insecurity has long been the Bolivarian Revolution’s weak spot. Maduro’s response has been to call upon to the Venezuelan military (and the Bolivarian armed militias) for additional policing support.
- Court dismisses Capriles challenge
The constitutional court of the TSJ has thrown out legal challenges presented by the opposition against April’s presidential results. The TSJ ruled on 7 August that the challenges were not only “inadmissible” but also constituted through their tone a “grave offence”: it fined the opposition leader Henrique Capriles and recommended that he should be prosecuted by the attorney general’s office for seeking to undermine the credibility of the elections.
The president of the TSJ, Gladys Gutiérrez, said there was no concrete evidence of fraud. She said Capriles would be fined BF10,700 (US$1,700) for using “insulting and disrespectful terms” impugning the integrity of the court and other institutions. The verdict came the day after Capriles said he would wait no longer for the TSJ and would turn to international bodies. Capriles responded on Twitter that what was “inadmissible” was “the lack of justice in Venezuela”.
- “If it’s necessary to change all the laws, we’ll do it”, President Maduro said at a ceremony in the capital Caracas to mark International Youth Day.
End of preview - This article contains approximately 1234 words.
Subscribers: Log in now to read the full article
Not a Subscriber?
Choose from one of the following options
