Jose Mauricio Gaona, The Globe and Mail: Dictatorship in Venezuela will soon be reality
Jose Mauricio Gaona is an O’Brien Fellow at McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, a Saul Hayes Fellow at McGill University’s Faculty of Law, and a Vanier Canada Scholar.
Sunday’s election in Venezuela of a national constituent assembly does not represent the very beginnings of Mr. Maduro’s dictatorship, but its final ascension. In truth, the actions of Mr. Maduro’s government in the past 12 months are archetypical of a dictatorship, not a democracy.
Once a government turns its security forces against its owns citizens and breaks the system of checks and balances between branches of power that upholds democracy, all that follows is dictatorship. In 2016, of the 21,752 homicides in the country, nearly 5,000 were at the hands of security forces. Since protests started on April 1 this year, 115 people have been killed, nearly 2,000 injured and more than 4,000 detained. As Mr. Maduro appeals for reconciliation and peace, more than 400 civilians are being prosecuted before military tribunals.
Read more ....
WNU Editor: AP had a picture last night of a few old people sitting on chairs in front of a polling station waiting to vote .... they were the only ones there. If this is the 41.5% that the Venezuelan government is boasting non-stop that voted .... what can I say .... I experienced enough Soviet elections in my life to know a bogus claim when I see one. On a side note the above author of this Globe and Mail commentary is Jose Mauricio Gaona. He is an O’Brien Fellow at McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism in Montreal, and I have seen him speak on what is happening in Venezuela. What he has to say is riveting, and the above commentary is a must read.
WNU editor, if you think that chavism has not millions of supporter you are in the wrong way.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.taringa.net/posts/info/19142680/Vzla-Asi-fue-recibido-el-Pdt-Maduro-en-el-cierre-de-campana.html
Maybe once Chavism was popular. But no more now.
ReplyDeleteIt is like Cuba. My father was there in the early 1970s and Castro was popular. When he and my mother visited there in the mid-1990s .... that support was no longer there.
Same as Russia today. There is a Communist Party, but if you read their platform it is a free market pro-entrepreneur platform.
But unlike Cuba where Russia provided enormous support for decades, Venezuela does not have a "safety net". I can spend the entire day posting videos from people in Venezuela who are chronicling what is happening there. And as I have been sadly predicting in this blog for the past 2-3 years .... gathered from having too much personal experience on how these things end .... this downward spiral is going to get worse.