Citizens’ Platform in Defense of the Constitution: For a peaceful and democratic solution to Venezuela’s grave crisis

Published in Spanish at Aporrea. Translation by LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

Venezuela has been experiencing a serious political crisis for several years, which reached its peak when Nicolás Maduro’s regime ignored the results of the July 28, 2024, presidential elections, committed monumental fraud and declared Maduro the winner, with the complicity of the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) and the National Electoral Council (CNE). This fraud was finally consummated on January 10, when he was “sworn in” for a new term in office.

The Venezuelan people’s spontaneous reaction to this fraud was to initiate street demonstrations on July 29 and 30, 2024, demanding that the full results be published and that the majority vote for opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia be respected, based on what had been observed at polling stations and in the thousands of videos that showed local results being announced, including by military officers involved in Plan República [the military operation that safeguarded the electoral process]. The Maduro regime responded by unleashing brutal repression against peaceful demonstrations, resulting in more than 20 deaths and more than 2000 arrests.

Since then, Venezuela has effectively been under a state of emergency. Although several hundred detained protesters have since been released (though they face ongoing court proceedings), hundreds of other opposition activists have also been detained, including prominent democratic leaders such as Enrique Márquez.

The result, in which Maduro was “elected” president, has been imposed via terror, with kidnappings and disappearances becoming standard police practice, a repressive policy recently denounced by the Norwegian government, among others. The complete suppression of due process for those detained: their disappearance, isolation, and denial of access to private lawyers and the case against them — all widely denounced by family members and others close to those affected — are standard practice applied by the government against the nearly 1000 political prisoners currently in Venezuelan jails.

This context in which the United States government has undertaken its recent actions, declaring the so-called “Cartel of the Suns” a narco-terrorist organisation and deploying a naval fleet to the Caribbean Sea, supposedly with the objective of “combatting drug trafficking” being carried out by the aforementioned “Cartel” (that, they claim, is run by the Maduro government). An immediate result of the presence of these US warships was the recent announcement by the US government, with President Donald Trump himself acting as spokesperson, of a missile strike [on September 2] on a boat that was supposedly transporting drugs. [A second boat was attacked on September 15, after this statement was released]. The Maduro government, however, has responded by saying that this is a montage based on a video created using artificial intelligence. These events overlap with the cases that the US Attorney's Office opened up several years ago against Maduro, [interior minister Diosdado] Cabello and other high-ranking Venezuelan government officials accused of drug trafficking. A reward for the information leading to their capture has been offered that, in Maduro's case, was recently raised to $50 million.

We believe that this US military mobilisation, rather than representing a fight against drug trafficking, instead represents an unacceptable interventionist pressure, which seeks to provoke a change of government in Venezuela. The characteristics of the military vessels deployed to the Caribbean do not correspond with those needed to combat drug trafficking via sea, but instead reflect a capacity to carry out a military intervention through attacks on Venezuela’s territory or that of any other Latin American country.

Faced with this complex reality, we restate what we have defended for years as a political program to confront and overcome the Venezuelan crisis:

1) We reject all forms of foreign interference as a supposed way to resolve the Venezuelan crisis. While we support Venezuela maintaining cordial political and economic relations with all nations, we reject any intervention by major powers, or any other country, either publicly or covertly, in our nation’s internal affairs.

2) In accordance with this, we reject the rewards offered by the US government for the capture of Venezuelan officials, and also reject any possible armed intervention by this superpower, which aims to bring about a change of government in Venezuela. The Trump administration’s naval deployment is an unacceptable threat and must be repudiated by all Venezuelans, as its real objective is to increase US intervention in Latin America. We reject these threats, which imply the continuation of a US supremacist foreign policy based on the Monroe Doctrine, which considers us its “backyard,” and that the Liberator Simón Bolívar warned us about two hundred years ago.

3) We believe that Maduro's exit from power is a necessary and essential step to resolving the Venezuelan crisis. Maduro overwhelmingly lost the July 28, 2024, elections. By remaining in power, Maduro’s government has transformed into a de facto authoritarian government, violating popular sovereignty and shredding the 1999 Constitution. However, Maduro’s exit from power must occur in a peaceful and sovereign manner, through popular pressure and peaceful civil resistance in the streets, dialogue and negotiation, and the restoration of the democratic mechanisms enshrined in the Constitution.

4) The extremely serious situation we have outlined has one thing in common: the violation of our sovereignty by two different forces. On the one hand, the US government threat to violate our sovereignty as a nation, as established in Article 1 of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (CRBV), which is currently ceasing to be merely a threat and becoming an accomplished fact, with the destruction of a Venezuelan boat in international waters in the Caribbean resulting in the deaths of the eleven crew members, along with threats against our Air Force aircraft that flew over US Navy vessels in international waters. On the other hand, the blatant violation of popular sovereignty (Article 5 of the CRBV), when the Maduro-PSUV [United Socialist Party of Venezuela] government ignored the results of the July 28, 2024 elections in which the vast majority of Venezuelans voted against the government, and yet Maduro was proclaimed the winner by the CNE and the TSJ, with the electoral body yet to publish results, more than a year after the elections, in violation of the law and the constitution.

Amid this profound crisis, we reiterate some basic measures for moving forward with restoring the national constitution, which the working people should demand from the ruling elite to achieve National Unity in a United Front to confront the aggressor US empire:

• Immediate publication of the polling booth tallysheets with the results from July 28, 2024, tallied up and broken down by state, municipality, parish, polling centre and polling booth.
• Immediate release of all political prisoners, including those from the military. The annulment of the 9000 ongoing trials against those who have been released.
• Restoration of all fundamental and constitutional rights that the government has blatantly violated for years, such as to do with wages (Article 91 of the CRBV). Conversion of war and food bonds ($160) into a minimum wage and the reinstatement of public administration salary scales based on a minimum wage of $160 a month. Bring pensions inline with this minimum wage.

To implement these proposals, we call for the greatest unity of democratic political forces, while promoting the peaceful organisation of the people through trade unions, professional associations, student unions, peasant organisations and any other form of participation contemplated by the constitution. We are convinced that only with the broadest participation of the Venezuelan citizenry can the constitution be restored and the republic saved.

For the Citizens’ Platform in Defense of the Constitution: Antonia Munoz, Oly Millan, Hector Navarro, Juan Garcia, Luis Mogollon, Gustavo Marquez, Edgardo Lander, Carlos Mendoza Potella, Roberto Lopez, Mariano Crespo, Santiago Arconada, Ana S. Viloria