Desestabilizar / Oswaldo Barreto

Destabilize

Destabilize is the key word spoken by high officials within Chavismo when they judge any display of rejection by Venezuelans against president Chávez’s political decisions. Save in electoral moments, the opposition doesn’t exist for them except as a form of permanent destabilizing plotting, condemned ahead of time, as we well know, by democratic laws and principles. This systematic practice by the government has resulted in a real paradox which has characterized Hugo Chávez’s regime throughout its various periods. We’re referring to Chavismo’s reiterated practice of considering the opposition to clearly undemocratic or evidently unconstitutional governmental dispositions – such as the procedures that have been followed while constituting the CNE [National Electoral Council], the Judicial Power or the military high command – as actions that should be considered undemocratic and unconstitutional, since they “conceal destabilizing intentions.” In this manner, for Chavismo there’s only one democratic way of opposing the government’s measures: to not oppose them.

And regardless of how much it jars and offends our democratic conscience, we should admit that up until now the government has been successful with this aberrant procedure. Measures such as granting the President faculties that normally belong to the Legislative Power in a state with a perfectly normal social order, which in any country with a Constitution establishing the separation and independence of powers would be understood as a self-coup d'état, here these go by unperceived – up until now at least, the government hasn’t “uncovered” a destabilizing plan to force the government to return to legality.

So then, it is the government’s practice of destabilizing the situation, in order to blame the opposition for such an occurrence, which has reached a low point with the disgraceful process leading to the closure of RCTV. Chavistas can’t claim that a plot has been created by the 80% of Venezuelans who have expressed their opposition, using the means at their disposal, to an absolutely tyrannical measure, which shows no respect toward laws and the democratic spirit. At this point even the majority of Chavistas can identify the source of the destabilization that permanently threatens the regime.




{ Oswaldo Barreto, TalCual, 28 May 2007 }