Change nurtures fear. Once fear sets in people stops functioning normally as it acts a barrier to logical thinking while preferring explanations that clearly identify a culprit. Today fear is clearly thriving in several latitudes of the Americas. In the US the lack of clear project to confront change is spreading fear among its citizens. In Latin America organized crime has taken over politics to inject fear in most democratic leaders and their populations.
In this model, Evo Morales has implemented the “vote-catching dictatorship” in Bolivia. He has conceptualized this electioneering dictatorship as “that political regime that by force or violence concentrates all political power into one person or group, crushes and suppresses human rights and basic freedoms and utilizes elections as a means of simulation and propaganda in order to indefinitely keep itself in power”. It is about controlled and manipulated elections.
The recent announcement by President Donald Trump recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights generated a number of reactions. If the Golan Heights “legally” and actually belongs to Syria, as European nations claim, how exactly does this position serve the European goals and interests in the region? There should be little dispute that, in this chaotic situation, Israel should keep the Golan Heights indefinitely.
Juan Guaido is imprisoned, not physically as of yet, by the Castroist Chavist dictatorship. It is by far more serious than that, Guaido is imprisoned by the greatest act of selfishness that the so-called political class can perpetrate against a nation that is suffering a humanitarian crisis. Freeing Guaido means to immediately allow him to be the President In Charge, to help him to put together a government of national unity, and to truly help him by setting aside the “two-faced politics”.
Guatemala truly is a showcase of corporativism. The economy is run by about 15 players who determine market conditions at polo matches. Political parties are organized around the idea that the public treasury is the election bounty. Television radio and movie theatres are monopolized by a single powerful economic group that gets to decide what news is to be spread and what entertainment will prevail in the country. The military is partly penetrated by powerful economic interests and partly by organized crime. Court decisions can be commissioned — should the price be right.
Hate speech expresses and incites hatred toward other human beings on account of some aspect of their identity. And as people tend to search for a culprit different from themselves when it comes to failure, hate speech facilitates solving the riddle.
The “term narco-state is applied to all such countries whose institutions are heavily and significantly influenced by narcotics’ trafficking and whose leadership are, simultaneously; governmental officials and members of illicit narcotics’ trafficking networks, shielded and protected by their legal immunities”. Narco-politics is “such political activities in which the State’s institutions are gravely influenced by narcotics’ trafficking”.
Today, in Venezuela, there are only two institutions that do not recognize Juan Guaido as the President In Charge and these are; Maduro’s dictatorship and the National Assembly who supposedly wants to end the dictatorship. Guaido is hostage to the sum of minorities who comprise the opposition’s majority and who prevent the President from forming a government.
Without rule of law people do not own their lives, property or a future. Absence of Rule of Law not only defines the political character of a society, but it affects development. The United States is “one nation under God with freedom and JUSTICE for all,” as the Pledge of Allegiance says. “There shall be one rule of Justice for the rich and the poor; for the favorite in Court, and the Countryman at the Plough.”
In Venezuela, the dictatorship is exhausting its last resources, its playing its last pawns, and is trekking towards its unavoidable end. The question remains, however, as to how long that end will take to arrive and what must be done to speed it up and for it to represent a true change for the reconstruction of a society and a state devastated by the intervention of transnational organized crime. In a confrontation, such as the one Venezuelan people are enduring, victory is achieved by the aggregate of one’s own correct decisions and the incorrect decisions taken by the enemy.
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