The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Venezuelan vote to mark major power shift
One by one, the markers of Venezuela’s democracy have been pushed aside.
First, the Supreme Court was packed with loyalists of the president, and several opposition lawmakers were blocked from taking their seats. Then, judges overturned laws that the president opposed, and elections for governors around the country were suddenly suspended.
Next, the court ruled in favor of dissolving the legislature entirely, a move that provoked such an outcry in Venezuela and abroad that the decision was soon reversed.
Now, President Nicolás Maduro is pushing a radical plan to consolidate his leftist movement’s grip over the nation: He is creating a political body with the power to rewrite the country’s constitution and reshuffle — or dismantle — any branch of government seen as disloyal.
The new body, called a constituent assembly, is expected to grant virtually unlimited authority to the country’s leftists.
Venezuelans are going to the polls today to weigh in on the plan. But they will not have the option of rejecting it, even though some polls show that large majorities oppose the assembly’s creation. Instead, voters will be asked only to pick the assembly’s delegates, choosing from a list of stalwarts of Maduro’s political movement.
The new assembly will rule above all other governmental powers — technically even the president — with the kind of unchecked authority not seen since the juntas that haunted Latin American countries in decades past.
“This is an existential threat to Venezuelan democracy,” said David Smilde, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights advocacy group.
The list of delegates includes powerful members of the president’s political movement, including Diosdado Cabello, a top lawmaker in the ruling Socialist Party who was involved in a failed coup attempt in the 1990s, and Cilia Flores, the president’s wife.
But the push to consolidate power also puts the country at a crossroads, one laden with risk.
As Maduro effectively steers his country toward one-party rule, he sets it on a collision course with the United States, which buys nearly half of Venezuela’s oil. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s administration froze the assets of, and forbade Americans to do business with, 13 Venezuelans close to Maduro, including his interior minister and the heads of the army, police and national guard.
The administration is warning that harsher measures could follow, with “strong and swift economic actions” if the vote happens today, according to Trump. In a statement, he called Maduro a “bad leader who dreams of becoming a dictator.”
There is also the potential powder keg on Venezuela’s streets. Infuriated by Maduro’s government, the opposition has mobilized more than three months of street protests that have crippled cities with general strikes, rallies and looting. More than 110 people have been killed, many in clashes between the state and armed protesters. Few know how protesters will react to newly imposed leaders.
Even the members of the new assembly themselves are a wild card. Their power will be so vast that they could possibly remove Maduro from office, some analysts note, ending a presidency that has been deeply unpopular, even among many leftists.
“It’s a crapshoot, a Pandora’s box,” said Alejandro Velasco, a Venezuelan historian at New York University who studies the country’s leftist movements. “You do this and you have so little control over how it plays out.”
Maduro contends that the government restructuring is necessary to prevent more bloodshed on the streets and save Venezuela’s failing economy, which is dogged by shortages of food and medicine.
The president has refused to negotiate with street protesters, calling some of them terrorists and asserting that they are financed by outside governments trying to overthrow him. A new governing charter would give him wide-ranging tools to “construct peace,” he and leftists have said.
“We need order, justice,” Maduro said during an interview with state television this month. “We have only one option, a national constituent assembly.”
The turmoil gripping Venezuela illustrates the sweeping declines in popularity for the Venezuelan left since the death of its standard-bearer, President Hugo Chávez, in 2013.
It was Chávez who oversaw the last rewrite of the constitution, in 1999, which was widely backed by the voters who had propelled him to office in the belief that the country’s rule book favored the rich.
That new constitution — and rising oil prices — fueled a socialist-inspired transformation in Venezuela. It helped enable Chávez to redistribute state wealth to the poor, nationalize foreign assets and make him popular with his supporters. The constitution also left open the possibility of another constituent assembly in the future.
Now Maduro has taken that option at a time when the leftists are dogged by their deepest crisis in decades. This time, Venezuelans are seeing it less as a stab at reform than as an attempt by a struggling ruling class to maintain power.
“It’s a last-ditch effort to secure his base,” Velasco said. “He’s doing it at a moment of weakness.”
Under the rules of the vote, the constituent assembly would take the reins of the country within 72 hours of being officially certified, though it is unclear to most people what would happen after that.
Some politicians have suggested that governors and mayors be replaced with “communal councils.” Top members of Maduro’s party have identified Luisa Ortega, the attorney general, who has criticized Maduro’s crackdown on protesters, as someone to be immediately dismissed.
But many fear that a likely first step will be the abolition of the country’s legislature, a tactic first used by Chávez when rewriting the constitution in 1999.
Leftists did not control the legislature then, and the same is true today. For more than a year, courts close to Maduro have chipped away at the powers of opposition lawmakers there, overturning laws like a measure to release political prisoners and stripping it of budgetary oversight.
Organizers of a symbolic vote against the measure this month said more than 7 million ballots had been cast, with 98 percent backing the opposition.
Juan Guaidó, an opposition lawmaker, fears that the constituent assembly will dismantle his chamber, effectively liquidating any political power held by Maduro’s rivals.
“If there was anything left of Venezuela’s battered democracy, it was the powers that were legitimately elected by the people, like the National Assembly,” he said, adding that the vote would create a “totalitarian and repressive dictatorship.”
Still, some say the opposition has failed to offer clear alternatives to Maduro. Eva Golinger, an American lawyer who was a confidante of Chávez’s, said rivals of the leftists had focused too heavily on wresting power from the president, something that could risk a wider civil conflict.
“They only rally around regime change,” said Golinger, who opposes how Maduro has gone about the constitutional rewrite.