NO To Constitutional Reform!

The following entry was not written by me, but instead was written in Spanish by my friend Ciro for his blog about video games, El Chigüire Literario (The Literary Capybara). However, with his permission I translated it to English for a whole new audience to read:

El Chigüire Literario says NO to Venezuela's Constitutional Reform

What's happening these days

These days in Venezuela, our president Hugo Chávez presented a proposal of "Constitutional Reform" to the National Assembly to modify 33 articles in the Constitution. These articles where debated by the National Assembly and its members added 13 more articles to the list. The problem arises that all of this has happened in less than 5 months, and in only 27 days this will be submitted to a public vote for this Reform whose discussion has been plagued with conflicts and defensive attitudes by the members of the National Assembly.

In root of this situation I expose my point of view with respect to this, and why I consider that this reform will NOT improve the country's current situation.

How did we get here?

It's difficult to summarize our current situation; it's tremendously complicated. Notice that I've started at the end with the voting for the Reform, but this is the result of other events and past situations, and to try to cover everything means to tell the history of Venezuela's modern democracy, which goes back almost 50 years. I will however enumerate a few points about this country that I believe can summarize it a little about how we got to this point:

• Venezuela has a great problem with poverty. And I'm not just talking about the people's material poverty. We have a great problem with education that hopelessly sets our whole population behind.
• The poverty problem gets worse with social unbalance. We have the poorest of the poor and at the same time the richest of the rich. This is a ticking bomb to any nation.
• Previous administrations' politics have been populist. The result is that a big part of the population thinks that the Government must provide everything that is necessary to live. And almost all of the population thinks that problems must to be resolved in months, while in order to revert our situation requires a careful plan that could take years to solve our problem.
• The current administration, with almost 9 years in power, has known how to captivate a great part of the Venezuelan population, mostly including the poor. It's a clear and established objective for the president to stay in power as much time as possible since he believes to be the only one capable of solving Venezuela's problems and gives no chance to other parties. It's publicly known that Hugo Chávez wants to stay in power "until 2021", "until 2031", or "forever" as he has admitted in various occasions. In a masterful political plan, it makes these poor people believe that Venezuela's problems are caused by "oligarchs" and "rotten parties". And although it's true that in Venezuela there have been small groups with big concentrations of very powerful people, the truth is that they want to include every person who happened to make a good living with honest and hard work in these groups as well. At the same time, this plan includes the constant promise of a better future, a better future, and that future... never gets there: we continue to have the same levels of poverty. It doesn't matter if the administration can inflate all the numbers it can and define them to its own liking. The real numbers are showing when you go out on the streets and see reality standing right in front of you.
• The previous point has caused a social rupture that has never been seen in decades. I'm not exaggerating if I tell you that currently there are two conflicting Venezuelas. From this radical sides emerge and these sides end up in fights, wounds, and even deaths. From this radicalism comes terribly blinded visions of reality from both sides: Everything that is not in agreement with the president's line of thoughts is immediately labeled as counter-revolutionary, oligarch, coup-inducing, etc., and there are quick jumps to conclusions like things are financed by the United States, which one of the more aggressive of the current government ideology although we continue to happily make business with them.
  

Back to the topic

The Constitutional Reform follows closely the points about the current administration that I've just described to you.

One part plans various strong changes to the Constitution that deserve to completely rewrite it once again: an undefined number of terms for the president (or continuous reelection), establish a socialist form of government, something that we know it hasn't really worked in other countries around the world, limit basic human rights in case of state of emergency, change the definition of private property to give the power to the government to have greater control over it.

The other part plans changes of the same populist nature that we've already had even before the current administration: reduce the quantity of work hours per week, recognize in a piece of paper "the power of the people", or whatever that means, and other things.

And it's not that this Reform is completely bad. The thing is that the last piece of the machine which would give excessive power to the president is that this whole series of changes are going to be polled as only two blocks of laws including the two parts already explained.

And it's because of this, among other reasons, that I diagree with these changes and I will say NO to this Reform.