Versión Español
EspañolOn December 2, five days out from the municipal elections and with no pluralistic debate, Venezuela’s Chavista majority in the National Assembly approved the so-called Simón Bolívar National Plan. This “Plan of the Fatherland 2013-2019” has now become a law of the republic.
In an evident attempt to provoke and defy the opposition’s leadership and democratic forces of the country prior to the elections, President Nicolás Maduro has guaranteed that all “authorities, military, governors, majors, everyone, should obey this project” — adding that he will govern until 2019, with this law in hand.
Of course, the president didn’t say that he would respect or discuss opinions and proposals of more than half of the population that do not agree with the content and goals of this project. On the contrary, the plan will be imposed by force. For that to happen, he will draw upon all the power of the state, as well as the enabling superpowers granted recently by the Chavista National Assembly, which allow him to govern by decree for a year. Maduro considers this project to be not only a government guideline, but “the political testament of Commander Chávez” and “the most important project in the history of Venezuela, because it resumes all the roads, the aspirations, and the battles that unite all the parties and groups who support the revolutionary process.”
Indeed, this plan deepens and radicalizes even more the neocommunist, Bolivarian socialism expressed in the previous Simón Bolívar Nacional Project (2007-2013), approved by the National Assembly after Hugo Chávez’s presidential triumph in 2006. This aimed to change all the structures of the nation through the implementation of the “five engines” or strategic processes: a socialist ethic, a socialist economy, a socialist revolutionary and leading democracy (Communal Revolutionary State and Popular Power), the supreme happiness of the people in social matters, and a new national and international geopolitical framework.
The new Plan of the (socialist) Fatherland, imposed today by Nicolás Maduro and his government, is the same government proposal that the former candidate and President Hugo Chávez presented for the presidential elections on October 7, 2012, and launched after his triumph until his death, early this year. After the passing of the “supreme leader,” Maduro, alongside the president of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, has done nothing but talk of the irreversible nature of this Chavista project, now embodied in the Simón Bolívar National Plan for the presidential term 2013-2019.
In the domestic domain, this plan proposes to accelerate the transition towards socialism — as a purported process to restore the power to the people — and the radicalization of the participatory and leading democracy, to “crush completely the bourgeois State we have inherited . . . and continue the invention of new ways of political management.”
In the international domain, the goals of the program are even more ambitious and deluded than the previous plan. It proposes to defend, expand, and consolidate Bolivarian socialism for the 21st century, to achieve real change in the capitalist world-system, which they suppose is going through a structural crisis that can be final; to turn Venezuela into a world power, socially, economically, and politically — according to what they call “the Great Emerging Power of Latin America and the Caribbean”; to contribute towards the development of a “new International Geopolitics,” in which a multipolar world arises. These plans, supposedly, will allow balance in the universe, guarantee planetary peace, preserve life on the planet, and save the human species.
That begs the question, will Maduro’s government be able to put into practice this governmental plan? After reviewing Chavista behavior for 15 years, and especially during the few months of Maduro’s tenure, it’s evident he will try. He will use all possible means, including illegal ones, according his power interests as well as the national and international circumstances he will have to face.
At what point, though, will democratic society and democratic international community react to this plan and its imposition. Up until now, both have relied on democratic and electoral strategies, peaceful and restrained in general — although they haven’t been exempt from conflicts and protests on the streets. But will they be able to continue responding in such ways?
Society and its leadership will have to change their strategies, as this recently approved project shows its true communist and dictatorial face — well explained by the fellow PanAm Post writer, Enrique Standish. Insofar as the government fulfills the fourth and last phase of “the Process,” it will have achieved the complete “Revolutionary State,” and it will have become “the second communist totalitarian State of the continent.”
Translated by Marcela Estrada.
