Venezuela’s Ambassador to St. Lucia, Leiff Escalona, says her country is ready to elect representatives for the National Constituent Assembly (NCA) in a vote scheduled for Sunday.
She also said that when formed, the NCA will address new forms of participatory and protagonistic democracy, the integrity of the nation and a new vision of the multi-polar and multi-centric world, Venezuela’s cultural identity, the participation of youth, climate change and the mechanisms to contribute to people across the globe.
In an interview with The VOICE on Thursday, Escalona said Sunday’s polls to elect representatives for the NCA is an initiative from President Nicolas Maduro which will help further develop the country’s democracy and help ease tensions with the opposition.
She quoted President Maduro as saying that the call for the NCA was made in the context of the current social, political and economic circumstances buffeting Venezuela at this time, including severe internal and external threats against the country’s democracy and its constitutional order.
She blames the violence sweeping the country on the opposition coalition which, she says, is backed by the Unites States and the local and international media, all aimed at bringing down the democratically-elected Maduro.
“The current violence has involved attacks on State facilities and services such as maternity hospitals, electricity supplies, food depots and public transport and also targeted assassinations of government supporters,” the Ambassador said.
According to her, the violence began in early April this year, resulting in scores of deaths, and injuries to over 1,200 people.
“A key tactic in the violent protests is the use of ‘guarimbas’ — or street blockades — created by masked protesters,” she said.
The Ambassador believes that the objective of the violence experienced in Venezuela at this time is to generate chaos and increase internal conflict in the government to force President Maduro to resign.
“This new surge of violence was announced by the main political parties of the opposition, which are financed and orchestrated by Washington,” Escalona said, adding that the opposition does not want Sunday’s vote to take place.
Escalona explaining the importance of Sunday’s exercise, saying it is the people of Venezuela who have the power, which they are exercising, to call a National Constituent Assembly for the purpose of transforming the State, creating a new juridical order and drawing up a new Constitution.
According to the Ambassador, the initiative for calling a National Constituent Assembly may emanate from the President of the Republic sitting with the Cabinet of Ministers, from the National Assembly by a two-thirds vote of its members, or from the Municipal Councils in open session by two-thirds of their members, and from 15% of the voters registered with the Civil and Electoral Registry.
Political reasons for the NCA, as pointed out by the Ambassador, are the constant violent acts of destabilization, refusal to acknowledge the institutions and public powers constitutionally-elected by the opposition, the continued denouncement and abandonment by the opposition of the dialogue process facilitated by ex-presidents and the repeated interference in the internal affairs of Venezuela by organizations such as the OAS, the United States Department of State and the global hegemonic communications media, which the Ambassador Barrueta said intend to position the opinion matrix that in Venezuela there is a strong dictatorship.
Why the US oligarchs are opposed to the Venezuelan elections for the Constituent Assembly:
“If the U.S. Revolutionary War was the most important even in U.S. history, then the Constitutional Convention in 1787 comes in second. Since then, the US has never approved of another constitutional convention – the basis for a true(r) participatory democracy. All laws and changes to the constitution in the US must go through the established broken-voting produced, oligarch-bribed Congress.
Somewhere in all the other reasons the US chooses to meddle in Venezuela’s affairs is the abject horror of the Venezuelan people to determining the terms of their own constitution. There’s simply not enough time to blackmail or bribe everyone involved to bend to US interests. The US can’t stand the thought of Venezuelan little people putting themselves first, and calls the vote for a Constituent Assembly on Sunday “a coup”!
One can argue ad nauseum about what’s wrong with Venezuela and who’s to blame – I’m sure there have been plenty of polls. But the only poll I’m interested in seeing is the one that asks all Venezuelans IF their government is seriously broken and if it needs to be fixed. Leaving out the ‘how’ part, I’m sure most would answer ‘yes’.
The US lawmakers’ paranoia about ever allowing another Constitutional Convention is that all their carefully-crafted, power- and money-sucking ‘deals’ over the years would collapse. Worse yet, the little people might enact harsh provisions for Congress doing so in the future. Heaven forbid!
The last thing the US Congress wants to see is some other country giving the ‘little people’ in the US the notion that they own the country and its laws, and Congress are merely contract employees of the little people. Such dangerous thought must be snuffed out wherever it arises. Venezuelans must not even be allowed the possibility change their constitution, laws or government policies – that’s what bribes and sanctions are for.”
The US Constitutional Convention in 1787 was grossly UN-DEMOCRATIC:
“Except it wasn’t even close to being a “convention”, which implies something openly transparent. It was coup engineered by some of the wealthiest citizens of the new nation to overthrow the current governing document–The Articles of Confederation–and totally morph the Continental Congress into a vastly different set of institutions, all the while adding an elected Emperor, whose selection wasn’t to be left to the hoi polloi, and whose powers were almost unstoppable. The entire event from start to finish is the Outlaw US Empire’s Foundational Big Lie, which was first deeply investigated by Charles Austin Beard whose An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States caused uproars of condemnation when it was published in 1913. Fortunately Beard was a well respected and already well established historian at a time when the Propaganda and Indoctrination Systems didn’t have anywhere near the power they have today.
It’s rather plain to see for those willing to look that the USA’s system of governance’s been broken beyond repair when nothing was done or even debated about reigning in what was clearly an overly powerful Executive by WW2’s end. The almost unremembered debate between Beard and Henry Luce–Time/Life Corp and coiner/promoter of The American Century prior to Pearl Harbor–over the pitfalls of the Imperial Presidency can still be read in Beard’s The Republic: Conversations on Fundamentals, perhaps his most important and least read book published in 1943–still extremely relevant today. Well meaning warnings from what were once known as Traditional Conservatives from both parties went unheeded, Wallace was ousted in favor of Truman, and the well planned National Security Act of 1947 was railroaded into being and thus what was once the USA became the Outlaw US Empire. ”
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/07/countdown-to-war-on-venezuela.html#comments