Yesterday Venezuela's Supreme Court decided to declare as legal the ban preventing 260 people from running for office at November's regional election. You will find an article in Spanish here. A very good post was written by Daniel Duquenal in English here. The typos in the Supreme Court's original text are the least shocking thing (and one thing is what a blogger does on his free time and another what the top judges from the Supreme Court do after months of "work"). The ruling established that the General Comptroller can basically come up with new bans of all kinds not established in previous legislations.
This is the same court that has not ruled about a whole series of irregularities by the National Electoral Council (CNE), which, among other many things, has not produced the complete results for last December's referendum. The CNE has not provided those results EVEN IF IT SHOULD HAVE DONE THAT BY LAW AT MOST 2 WEEKS AFTER THE REFERENDUM. It has not provided them even if the difference between the yes and no votes is supposed to be less than 1%. It has not provided them even though the missing votes account for more than 10% of all the votes. It has done nothing even though the results we have so far are very unlikely: they would imply an abstention in the missing centres that is statistically impossible. Several organizations, led by Súmate, have demanded the Supreme Court to rule on the CNE's behaviour but the Supreme Court has done nothing. At the ESDATA site here a group of Venezuelans have placed in Spanish and English a lot of interesting, very concrete information about those irregularities the Supreme Court is simply ignoring. What the Supreme Court is able to do is to help Chávez in getting rid of potential opposition candidates.
Daniel has already explained very well many things in that post I mentioned. The Comptroller, the one who in the first place produced those bans against politicians, was doing so just because those politicians represented a danger for pro-Chávez politicians. His excuse was a series of irregularities that are peanuts compared to the irregularities committed by countless pro-Chávez politicians , starting with Chávez himself. The politicians prevented from running have not been given the proper right to answer and there has not even been a judiciary decision about their specific real or not so real misdoings.
The Supreme Court probably decided to tell us the news yesterday when it saw the announcement by many politicians that there will be a march on Saturday in Caracas to protest against the delay and the probable decision of the Supreme Court. Now expect the military, the police and other groups blocking all possible roads to Caracas on the pretext that "there are construction works" or there are "extra security checks" or anything.
This is the farce of democracy we have in Venezuela.
As Chávez would say, now the justice in Venezuela is "roja rojita", red, very red.
This is the same court that has not ruled about a whole series of irregularities by the National Electoral Council (CNE), which, among other many things, has not produced the complete results for last December's referendum. The CNE has not provided those results EVEN IF IT SHOULD HAVE DONE THAT BY LAW AT MOST 2 WEEKS AFTER THE REFERENDUM. It has not provided them even if the difference between the yes and no votes is supposed to be less than 1%. It has not provided them even though the missing votes account for more than 10% of all the votes. It has done nothing even though the results we have so far are very unlikely: they would imply an abstention in the missing centres that is statistically impossible. Several organizations, led by Súmate, have demanded the Supreme Court to rule on the CNE's behaviour but the Supreme Court has done nothing. At the ESDATA site here a group of Venezuelans have placed in Spanish and English a lot of interesting, very concrete information about those irregularities the Supreme Court is simply ignoring. What the Supreme Court is able to do is to help Chávez in getting rid of potential opposition candidates.
Daniel has already explained very well many things in that post I mentioned. The Comptroller, the one who in the first place produced those bans against politicians, was doing so just because those politicians represented a danger for pro-Chávez politicians. His excuse was a series of irregularities that are peanuts compared to the irregularities committed by countless pro-Chávez politicians , starting with Chávez himself. The politicians prevented from running have not been given the proper right to answer and there has not even been a judiciary decision about their specific real or not so real misdoings.
The Supreme Court probably decided to tell us the news yesterday when it saw the announcement by many politicians that there will be a march on Saturday in Caracas to protest against the delay and the probable decision of the Supreme Court. Now expect the military, the police and other groups blocking all possible roads to Caracas on the pretext that "there are construction works" or there are "extra security checks" or anything.
This is the farce of democracy we have in Venezuela.
As Chávez would say, now the justice in Venezuela is "roja rojita", red, very red.
Kepler: are you aware of this report which recently appeared in Wikipedia with respect to murder rates?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.incosec.org/Microsoft%20PowerPoint%20-%20plan180%20actualizado.pdf
Perhaps better to put it into a link.
ReplyDeleteHi, Boludo. Thanks for the link. No, I was not aware of it. I knew about some of the key numbers, but not about others. For instance, I did not know we have a lot of cops in Venezuela. We do see a lot of weapons around there and a lot of policemen involved in crimes in Venezuela, not policemen solving things.
ReplyDeleteIn Belgi