Venezuelan elections: Exclusive interview with Tania Díaz, deputy of the National Assembly
In the south american country have had 25 elections in 20 years, the average is more than one per year. The Bolivarian Revolution has lost only two election
In an interview in Voces sin Fronteras, the vice president of the National Constituent Assembly of Venezuela (ANC) and candidate for deputy, Tania Díaz, said that most sectors of the Venezuelan opposition want to participate in the parliamentary elections scheduled for December 6.
“It is in our interest that the majority of the world’s observers come and see that we are very proud of the democracy we have built here in Venezuela”, she said in an interview in Voces Sin Fronteras, led by Bruno Sommer and Denis Rogatyuk. Next, the entire interview:
About the UN Human Rights report recently voted on by Argentina. What is your opinion of the report and why do you think it is not a serious report? Why are the systematic violations of Human Rights not measured with the same ‘standards’ in countries like Colombia, Chile and Bolivia?
The first thing to say is that the people who wrote the report are not ‘on the ground’, they are not here in Venezuela. The report is based on information via email or WhatsApp sent by organizations or political groups from here in Venezuela and that’s the first thing that disqualifies the report.
It is important to clarify which United Nations entity writes the report, which simply becomes better known because it has presence in the media of the ‘status quo’. It turns out that Venezuela has had an official mission from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, who is here in Venezuela and has evaluated, together with the government of President Nicolás Maduro, the Human Rights situation, that we have reached important agreements and that he has just now ratified the continuity of his work in Venezuela.
This is not the authority that writes the report that has been published, it is written by a special private mission, which, by the way, its coordinator is a person whose capacity has been called into question, and this ‘coordinator’ does the report on the basis of biased information provided by some Non-Governmental Organizations linked to political sectors, even the extreme right.
The official information, which rests in the files of the United Nations that the High Commissioner does, like that of all countries, recognizes things, for example, that the blockade that the United States has applied on the Venezuelan population is a crime against humanity. That the blockade harms the population, causes suffering to the people, and also, this year, recognizes some of the corrective measures that the Bolivarian Government of President Nicolás Maduro, has taken in the face of any ‘out of line action’ that has been committed by the police.
For example, the number of officials sentenced and imprisoned for having exceeded in their use of power in the control of public demonstrations, which did occur in a proportion in no way similar to the numbers that inflate those reports. I do not now have the exact number and I don’t want to be mistaken, but there are more than a hundred officials arrested, tried for these excesses and put in prison. Here there is a State that guarantees Human Rights, here (in Venezuela) the State does not evade its responsibility, rather it is a promoter of Human Rights.
Our attorney general, Tarek William Saab, is an activist, a defender of Human Rights for at least four decades and he is also internationally recognized for that and does not ‘turn a blind eye’ in the face of any excess (of public force).
So, it was simply a measure (the report) that was also coupled with the destabilization agenda that the parliamentary group coordinated by Juan Guaidó, of the extreme right, had for that purpose.
Note that that same day when the report comes out, Juan Guaidó makes a public statement urging the international community to apply the principle of responsibility to protect on Venezuela, that is a norm that was approved in 2005 at the United Nations. This norm has also been under a lot of questioning, because in some way it legitimates even a military intervention by neighboring countries in the region, in a country when the security of the citizens of the target country is threatened or by situations of systematic violations of human rights or by situations of famine or armed conflict.
And Guaidó was invoking that principle for a reason: we have parliamentary elections on December 6 and the option of the extreme right knows that it lost the elections already. It knows that it has nothing to say to the electorate. That is the reason why they do not participate in the elections and boycott the election process that has more or less 70% approval by the population, in the sense that they (the population) want it to be through electoral, peaceful, democratic means that the Venezuelan affairs be resolved. But this economic elite that entrenched itself in the political spaces of the National Assembly to destabilize the Venezuelan State is launching its last shots so that there are no elections because it knows it has lost.
It is constantly being said that there is no democracy in Venezuela, but in the last decades you have had at least a dozen elections to democratically elect your authorities at all levels. How do you respond to those who say that there is no democracy in Venezuela and what are the levels of citizen participation in the country’s elections?
We have had 25 elections in 20 years, the average is more than one election per year. The Revolution has lost two elections, the first was a constitutional reform promoted by Commander Chávez that we lost by a very small margin, and the other is the 2015 parliamentary election that President Nicolás Maduro took three and a half minutes — because I was in the room — after the National Electoral Council (CNE) gave the result, to say, ‘we recognize the victory of the opposition in the parliamentary elections’ and then went, as president, to the National Assembly to recognize the triumph of the opposition.
His annual message was given in front of the National Assembly and what did we receive as a response: that the then president of the National Assembly, the day that President Maduro went to recognize his triumph and his position as a majority in the National Assembly, stood in front of the television cameras, in front of the audience, to the world, and said: ‘Nicolás Maduro has six months left in office because we are going to remove him’, then he said democratically, etc., but the end of the term of the president was nowhere near. He was simply decreeing from the presidium of the National Assembly a clearly illegal situation that subverted the internal order.
What is important to understand here is that the agenda of that elite opposition, no longer has a majority even in the opposition sectors. 96% of the political parties that are valid here in Venezuela are participating in the parliamentary elections of December, what happens is that those who have media projection outside of Venezuela are the other percentage that has refused to acknowledge when they have lost those other 23 elections. The two elections that the Revolution lost, we recognized, but what the opposition has done, throughout these 20 years, has been to ignore when they lose the elections, call for street violence and international intervention. That has been its agenda.
When the opposition arrived to the National Assembly as a majority, that is, it legitimately took its place as a majority in a Power of the Republic as important as the legislative one, it was mounted on the agenda of the ‘fourth generation multimodal war’, which Barack Obama declared on Venezuela, since 2015 when he signed an Executive Order saying that Venezuela is an unusual and extraordinary threat to the security of the United States.
A similar order was signed against Iran, Syria and against Libya because they are oil-producing countries, like Venezuela, and the United States needs oil to solve its crisis.
That is so clear, what this political and economic elite, that entrenched itself in the National Assembly, has done since 2015 is to serve those interests. They allied themselves, they associated themselves, from the business point of view, with the United States. They got privileges and advantages, in fact most of them live outside of Venezuela, in Colombia, in Spain, in mansions, because they have received money from the United States so that they fulfill the task of disintegrating the Venezuelan State as we know it and converting Venezuela in a protectorate.
What I say may seem exaggerated, but there are two ‘instruments’ that can be found on the internet, one is a statute for the transition that Juan Guaidó, being president of the National Assembly, approved within that office. And the other is a contract that he signed in March of this year with a US company called Silvercorp. A company of mercenaries who worked for Donald Trump’s security rings. He signed it to legitimize an incursion of armed men, that were paid to come to Venezuela so as to hunt down and extract officials of the Venezuelan High Government, including President Maduro.
Who are we on the other side of the sidewalk? Since Commander Chávez called for the National Constituent Assembly, the principle of democracy has changed here, because ours is not a representative one, it is a participatory democracy.
The Constitution says ‘sovereignty in Venezuela resides non-transferable in the people, who exercise it directly through the means established in the Constitution and in the laws and indirectly through the vote’. The Venezuelan citizen does not go to vote and gives up its sovereignty to his representative, it is not like that. Here, the people are the depositary of the sovereignty. That is why we convened in 2017 a National Constituent Assembly to protect the State against the attack that was being made from one of the powers, which is the National Assembly.
So here there are elections for everything. We now have three thousand communes, which are forms of organization at the local level, beyond the municipality, the parish and the State. There are the communes that are chosen in their locality by different forms of organization, be them cultural, territorial or other interests, but the National Electoral Council, which is a Power of the Republic, legitimizes the elections to the communes, to the trade unions.
How much truth is there in what they say that there are two oppositions in Venezuela and how are they different?
I repeat the figure, 96% of the political parties that have a political life in Venezuela are going to participate in the 2020 elections. There is an alliance of the opposition, of some parties, that go together in these elections, that incorporates traditional political parties, what we call here the Fourth Republic, which is the representative system before the Revolution. There are leaders and political parties of that time of our history that are joining now, who simply said ‘we are not going to endorse a military intervention or an armed incursion against Venezuela’ and there are new political parties. For example, the two candidates who came closest to the presidential elections have a formula and are participating in the elections. That is, an evangelical pastor named Javier Bertucci and a former governor who has been twice candidate in previous elections, that comes from a center-left sector, that has a political party called Avanzada Progresista.
But there is also the old representation of Acción Democrática (Social Democracy). It is even said that the old Acción Democrática, represented by Henry Ramos Allup, who was also president of the National Assembly, is also participating on the quiet, under the table.
The political party Copei (Social Christians), from the old political regime, is participating in the elections. Primero Justicia, Henrique Capriles’ party, is divided and there is a sector that is participating because at the beginning of this year they rebelled against the leadership that did not allow them to participate in the decision making and against the leadership that received all the money from abroad, we call that the ‘rebellion of the regions’, which were people from the Capriles and Stalin González political parties who rebelled and said they were not going to lose their political path.
There are also people from Voluntad Popular, the party of Leopoldo López, who decided to go to the elections. Most of the sectors of the opposition want to participate in the election and, above all, they do not want to join that war agenda.
Against Venezuela there is a war declared that is lived every day. They sabotage the production and distribution of food and medicine. To us, it is like a bombing without a bomb. They attack the public services because they do not allow us to replace infrastructure or get spare parts because there is a constant threat from the United States to any company that wants to sell to Venezuela or wants to buy from it.
In this moment, the ships that carry Venezuelan oil or that bring supplies for the reactivation of the oil industry or for the local production of gasoline are being attacked on the high seas. There are more than a dozen that the United States attacked in the high seas like pirates of the 19th century. They diverted the ships and auctioned the cargo in Texas, which Venezuela had already paid for.
What did that attack consist of, this interception of ships by the US Navy that was carried out in the high seas? I understand there were three million barrels? How did that event happen and the success of the Iranian ships that did manage to arrive?
The important thing to understand is that it is a crime of aggression, that is the international legal term that should be given to it. It is a crime of aggression against the Venezuelan people, because here (in Venezuela) the businessmen who are not Chavistas, who are not civil servants cannot reactivate their industries, nor can they place their products abroad because they are prohibited by the Executive Order of Barack Obama. The important thing that I think we must understand, especially the left-wing movements in the region, is that it is an attack to the Venezuelan nation not to the government of Nicolás Maduro.
The United States needs to take this territory without a State to protect it, without a population to defend it, so as to turn it into a ‘no man’s land’ and take the Venezuelan oil, which is the world’s first oil reserve, via piracy and dispossession.
The US also wants to take the Venezuelan gold that is in the first three places of the largest world reserve and a territory, larger than the Dominican Republic, that is in the south of our country, which we call Arco Minero, which has immense wealth in coltan, in bauxite, in iron, in aluminum , in thorium, in a number of strategic resources that are essential for the United States to consolidate its project of becoming hegemony in the world.
The crisis has been in the capitalist system since 2009. That economy (the US) went into default in that year. The crisis is in the United States because it became a parasitic economy that does not produce, that lives off speculation.
The question now is who pays for the crisis. All attention is focused on Venezuela, but destabilizing Venezuela means, in our view, the beginning of a destabilization process in the region so they can go for the resources. That’s why they do what they do in Bolivia, because it has gas and lithium, and then they come for the water that they also have in the South, so the entrance is Venezuela.
That is why all this media apparatus is mounted so that we cannot look at the truth. I believe that we must strip away everything that the media says and look at it with different eyes and take actions that go beyond solidarity or write a letter, I think we have to get active. The left have to get active not only to defend Venezuela but to reposition our humanist and environmental projects that are committed to the human being. We have to reposition them in the region so as to not let the neocolonial project enter. That neocolonial project has been well thought out by the elite that governs the world and the North American elite.
The issue of the ships is that since 2015, with Obamas’s Executive Order they began to block the Venezuelan economy. The idea is to suffocate the economy, strangle it, to generate social chaos and then justify a change of regime or a Military intervention. This goes hand in hand with other war strategies that have to do — for example — with promoting confrontations between groups or factions of the same Venezuelan population, but this crime of economic aggression is in ‘crescendo’.
What is that about? For example, We have had attacks on the National Electric System that left the country without electricity. Now, to replace the installation that they damaged, burned and shot, like when they blew up a giant transformer that supplies electricity to much of the country. When Venezuela goes to buy the replacements, the companies that can sell us these parts, tell us that they cannot sell us anything because Donald Trump will sanction them and then the banks, through which the transaction can be made, say that they can’t work with us because the United States sanctions them. And the shipping companies that bring the supplies are also under threat . So this interception, that the US Navy made, in this case of oil, they have already done it with shipments that brought medicine and food for the popular distribution system that was created here that we call CLAP (Local Supply and Production Committees). They did it now with oil and they publicized it because it is also a strategy of terror, of terrorism, so that other countries take it as an example and warning, as we say here in Venezuela.
Then, they threatened those private shipping companies that Venezuela hires to bring supplies, as well as other countries, that if they mounted the cargo and brought the supplies, they would go to the extreme not only of threatening them but of intercepting them and that was what they did with some companies.
Iran no, Iran said we are going to take the oil to Venezuela and did everything it had to do to bring here gasoline and supplies for its production. Here we have three large refining centers, one was, until recently, the largest in the world, and now, these refineries cannot produce because the replacement of infrastructure, spare parts and machinery is boycotted because they do not let us bring supplies, so they generate chaos.
They impede the production so as to later say that the government of Nicolás Maduro has the people without gasoline and is starving. They have to generate chaos because that is their only political agenda. Juan Guaidó’s only political agenda is to make the Venezuelan people suffer and then say that it is the Government.
Returning to the electoral issue, what about the intervention of the United States so that opposition candidates cannot stand for election, imposing sanctions and removing visas from those who do want to participate?
What is published here in the political media is that it is not only denying them a visa, it is confiscating property they have in the United States, it is opening legal cases, it is a blackmail. The most exemplary spokesman of that is Henrique Capriles himself, he openly — a few weeks ago — said, ‘I don’t think the path of suicide is the most suitable, I think we have to participate, I think that if it is not elections, what paths are we going to look for’ and Capriles himself, two weeks later, says, ‘we cannot go to elections, that is not the way’. We wonder what happened there, well the United States twisted his arm with this type of blackmail that they have done with other politicians.
There are even investigations and complaints from media outlets that are directed by Venezuelans in Miami, who are openly opponents of the Revolution, but that among the internal fight that they have in the sectors of the extreme right opposition, a fight to the death for money because the money that the United States handed over to it for handing over Citgo, which in the midst of all this paraphernalia of the supposed virtual presidency of Guaidó, it really handed it over to him and the United States also confiscated from Venezuela, a Venezuelan company in the United States that has six thousand service stations and three refineries in North American territory. The United States stole it on the basis of what these Venezuelans did, who are ‘giving away’ their own country and in return receive money, but it seems that some did not like the ‘distribution that was made’ and so they are making many complaints.
Those sectors even opened investigations in Miami against Guaidó’s political partners for that blackmail, for being threatened, charging officials and deputies on the issue of visas, so as to not be put on the black list, not to be sanctioned.
There is a political blackmail that not even we denounced, the same sectors of the opposition are denouncing it. That is what happened with Henrique Capriles, with Stalin González, who had both said ‘we are going to participate in the 2020 elections’, they called them and some argument of great force was given to them, that they ended up withdrawing from the elections and it may be that it happens with some other representatives, individualities in this process.
But as I was saying, the Venezuelan people have a great culture of political wisdom and action, not only more than one election per year since Chávez arrived in 1999, but it is also a continuous political democratic exercise. Here (in Venezuela) there are elections and political debate for everything.
In the National Constituent Assembly — for example — we are going to approve a law that President Nicolás Maduro presented, which is an Anti-Blockade Law, with exceptional measures to defend the Venezuelan people against all the aggression of this blockade that has caused losses to the country of 112 thousand million dollars since 2014 to the present.
There is a national debate with that law, there are sectors that do not agree, including sectors of the Revolution itself, other political parties, and what did we do? We will be in each of the 335 municipalities and in each of the sectors that make up the National Constituent Assembly, which has spokespersons from the peasant, indigenous, women, disabled, elderly, workers, businessmen sectors, with each of these sectors we are going to hold a debate in the street about the content of that law, because this is how the Venezuelan democracy works.
Donald Trump can not understand this, because they do not know anything about love and what sustains us here, from the heart, is love made solidarity for the people. They can’t understand it and that’s why they act like the neighborhood thug, throwing shots and punches at everyone.
We understand that to guarantee democracy you have renewed the National Electoral Council, what was the process to choose a new CNE and how will it work in those new elections with the conditions that exist due to COVID-19?
Search (in the web) for Mesa de Diálogo Nacional (National Dialogue Table) of September 16, 2019. There are the opposition sectors that are currently participating in the elections. On that day, the results of the dialogue, the initial dialogue, between opposition sectors and the Venezuelan government, within the Venezuelan borders, were publicly announced, while Guaidó’s combo, the extreme right, sabotaged the dialogue initiative with Norway, the Dominican Republic, Barbados, all the initiatives that were made with international solidarity and accompaniment. Here, they sat down to discuss. That day it is said that six agreements were reached — more than a year ago — which were: we the Patriotic Bloc (Bloque de la Patria), I am a parliamentarian for the Patriotic Bloc and I am for the reelection We had withdrawn from the National Assembly due to all the violations of the Constitution, but as a result of the Dialogue Table, they asked us to reintegrate ourselves to the National Assembly and the following Tuesday we did so.
The second request of this dialogue was the renewal of the CNE authorities, who had not finished their term, but at the request of the opposition sectors and to generate a climate of confidence, the authorities were renewed.
Another of the requests resulted in a pardon that President Nicolás Maduro made to just over a hundred politicians or activists who were played a part related to the crimes of aggression that the United States has committed against Venezuela, that is, they participated in the ‘guarimbas’, in acts of general destabilization.
What was the first thing the CNE did after the authorities were renewed? It was to call the political organizations that wanted to participate to contribute, deliver, a drafting of articles so as to elaborate the regulations that lead to these elections. That is, the special regulations for the 2020 parliamentary elections, was drafted under the tutelage of that CNE and the participation of political parties.
We have an (electoral) system that is automated and has a ‘on the spot’ physical audit, in the electoral center. It is an electoral technological innovation recognized even by Jimmy Carter, who, when he came here for an electoral process, recognized that it was one of the most advanced in the world.
The one that was presented also has biosafety measures, for example, the identity document, will not be manipulated by the table members, but a mechanism was invented so that the card passes so that there is no physical contact of the hands to avoid contagion and has a whole biosecurity mechanism.
At this time, all the phases of our electoral process, the electoral registry, how many voters are we, how many are in each state and in each municipality, closed on a certain date. An impugnation process is opened that, by the way, It did not have any complaints, and afterwards there are audits, I think there are three until voting day, in which a spokesperson from each participating organization participates and that is done even with the ink with which we stain our finger.
That is why what President Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan Government and we as Bloque de la Patria (Patriotic Bloc) have said, because we are in perfect alliance, is that all the international companions who want and can come, it is our interest that they do come.
The European Union has said that they can’t organize themselves in time or that it does not feel like coming because the EU — and I mean the bureaucracy, not the people or the political parties — is manipulated, under the eye of the United States, so they will not come, but observers come from all over the world, they will be here in Venezuela.
It is in our interest that most of the world’s observers come and see that we are very proud of the democracy we have built here in Venezuela. It is not possible to trick an electoral system, the proof is that in 2015 the opposition won the elections and they had their majority for five years, nobody took away Parliament, nobody went to get them out of there, they had their government for five years, which is the period that constitutionally corresponds to them and that ends on January 5, 2021.
Guaidó had been asking for elections for a long time and now there are elections and he doesn’t want to participate and through interviews in international media he tries to delegitimize the process. Why do you think he doesn’t want to participating and measure himself at the polls to see his level of popular support?
I think it is because they have no chance of winning even in the most radical sectors of the opposition, the opposition elector feels betrayed, feels disappointed by that extreme right leadership that Guaidó represents. That is, a faction of the opposition, which came to the National Assembly with a promise to improve the living conditions of Venezuelans but on the contrary joined, accompanied, all this crime of aggression that has been committed against the population. Then the elector of Guaidó, or Julio Borges — who was president of the National Assembly and now lives in Colombia in a mansion — who is here and cannot get gasoline because they do not let us produce it, they do not let it arrive, and he has all the public service problems we have, and looks at how his leader, who made him vote for him in 2015, just turned his back on him, that elector, that person doesn’t want to know anything.
Here Guaidó has called for demonstrations, meetings and he does not succeed, and I am not exaggerating. He can’t even have the regulatory quorum in a session in Parliament. He does not achieve it, because even his supporters (deputies) rebelled in the National Assembly, so he does not have political choice, but also because he is simply a ventriloquist dummy of the Trump administration.
Guaidó is a dreary politician, I do not remember, and I apologize if I am wrong, a parliamentary proposal by that boy. He was elected by the state of La Guaira with about 80 thousand votes, in a state with the least population of the country, and he has simply achieved all the fame and prominence because he is the ‘toy’, the puppet that best serves the United States to fulfill its purpose because he has no ethical principle to stop it.
Imagine that in Chile any deputy goes and stands in a square and says that he is the president of Chile, that is absurd from every point of view, in Venezuela, in Chile and in any country in the world. Why could Guaidó do it? Because he had in his favor the ‘big stick’ and the dollars that the United States gives him and the concert of the media paid by the world powers, who are also at the command of the ruling elites. That’s all, for the rest, here in Venezuela he had a group of followers that was always a minority but is now a tiny minority. He knows that he cannot participate, that he has nothing to say to the Venezuelan people, to the Chavista or to the opposition.
Here in Venezuela something has happened, after what we have had to live which has been so painful, so strong, here the Novo Banco de Portugal confiscated I think it was 1,300 million euros, that was in the year 2017–2018, which were destined (produced by Citgo), to pay for bone marrow operations of Venezuelan children who were in a hospital in Italy. Many of these children have died as a result of this criminal policy. So all of us who have had to live that, have had no alternative but to unite in our differences. At this time, the majority of Chavistas and opponents, wants and believes that in 2020 we will choose a National Assembly that works united for the country, that despite the differences we can hold the political debate within the Hemicycle and in the social parliamentarianism of the street, which is our parliamentary proposal, but once we come to an agreement and those laws and guidelines are approved, we go out to defend these people, all of us who are living in such a critical situation.
So that agenda does not harmonize with Guaidó’s participation in the elections. He knows he cannot do it, that is why they want to delegitimize the elections. We have to prepare for a process after the elections where the Lima Group itself, which is nothing more than allied governments that, failing to achieve a majority within the OAS to attack Venezuela, set up a parallel group. Just the same as what happened in the United Nations where they could not consolidate the report they needed and so they set up a parallel group.
After several investigations, evidence continues to accumulate that confirms the theft done by Guaidó and his people and to that we add the scandal with the funds destined for humanitarian aid, do you think that even after all these things there is part of the international community that continues to support a guy like Guaidó?
A part of that ‘community’ supports him because what we have experienced from that story is a television series. They have put us in a narrated story, in an ‘ethic story’ built around us. They have put us — I say — and I mean the majority of the population that simply finds out what is happening in Venezuela through the hegemonic media, to watch and ‘live’ a series by chapters, by delivery, about the life of a man who is nobody but who serves the interests of those who attack the country very well. They have told us a cinematographic story that deceives a good part of the population and that is fed day by day by politicians who, in addition to being of the same formula, that is to say, from the extreme right, are partners.
What is important is that Venezuela is the largest oil reserve in the world, there are 300 billion barrels of oil deposited in the Orinoco Oil Belt, where Chávez achieved mixed deals with nations around the world, but that business is very substantial and it is also vital for the United States so it can sustain its predatory way of life of exaggerated consumption, it is vital. They do not have that oil, they need it to sustain themselves and that is why they want to come and take it by way of dispossession.
Then all those senators that we see who speak loud and strident, Marco Rubio, the same Mike Pompeo who recently came to do a tour, to surround Venezuela, at the time that the report of the UN collaborating mission came out and in the same moment that Juan Guaidó invokes the principle of responsibility to protect, because Pompeo — as denounced by President Maduro — came to give the starting signal for mercenary, paid, paramilitary groups to carry out terrorist and destabilization actions in Venezuela, They tried but could not do it because the other base of our Revolution is the civic-military union.
We have here as PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela) almost 300 thousand streets throughout the country that have a male or a female chief and these are points of aggregation of popular power, around that nucleus are the community members who produce food, the militias who monitor and guard the territory, the youth who bring social ‘home to home’ care, that is why COVID-19 did not affect us like in other countries.
We have an average of a little more than 500 deaths throughout the pandemic up to now, which we regret, and 80 thousand infections, the majority recuperated, because we managed to contain the pandemic in time thanks to that social organization.
We went house to house where there were sources of coronavirus outbreak with the medical brigades. Those 300 thousand streets now have prevention brigades against COVID-19. So that organization, that civic-military union protects the Venezuelan territory. That is why they have not been able to enter, that is why we caught two American mercenaries on the Venezuelan coasts when they tried to enter here, because we have prepared ourselves. No one has given us this, we have built it in 20 years, little by little and with a lot of work.
And in that construction we managed to eliminate poverty, multiply the number of public universities from 5 that there were to more than 50, we took health to the people through Barrio Adentro to each community, education is free and of quality from preschool to university. Nobody here pays for education, they also have access to health care, and it is right there where the center of pressure is now with this blockade and with all this aggression.
When there were focal points of violence, which we call ‘guarimbas’, these hooded youths were going to destroy transport units, burn universities, health centers, community media, they were destroying the infrastructure and the entire social welfare structure that we achieved building step by step, with the Revolution.
So the Venezuelan people are standing right now and in defense of what we all win, with our elections, with our rights, with our legislation built step by step. As a parliamentarian, I worked on the drafting of 12 laws, more or less, that support everything that is popular power. We have done all of this and it has been an immense job that we are not willing to let somebody take away from us because of the desires of an elite that is in crisis, that has a decadent, impoverished and in crisis model and that wants us to pay for its crisis.
After so many years in power, the PSUV is still the alternative majority to lead Venezuela, tell us three reasons why this is the case.
The first is because it is Chávez’s political party and Chávez left that organization for us to keep in our heart. The second was left by Chávez written in a book called Strategic Lines of Political Action, (2011), where he asks us to move on from being a powerful electoral machine, as we still are, to be a political party that was directly interwoven with the most heartfelt problems of the population. So we began to modify the structure and went from the electoral, which was already powerful, to this other that we call application networks and socio-political action that go to every community and every street and that are fulfilling Chávez’s mandate. We are side by side, hand in hand, intertwined with the problems of the population, that is, we as politicians right now It is very common for any citizen to come and throw the issue of public services in our face, that happens to us, but we do not evade it, we are not in Madrid, nor in Bogotá, nor in New York, we are here on the street and in all those streets the party PSUV is present and we do not evade problems, we confront them.
In 2015, when they sabotaged food production, that popular organization created a food distribution system that is the CLAP, which means that this gigantic popular organization that we have and that the party leads, brings to 6 million families — those who have more need — a bag of food every month when we can, or if not every month and a half, when we can because we are blocked, but we bring them bags of food at 90% subsidized prices to alleviate the effects of the crisis that has generated this aggression against Venezuela.
Another measure that President Maduro took that was highly criticized, and which, by the way, the High Commissioner questions it in her first report, is the Carnet de la Patria, which is an identity card, but it is a social card. It is a social card that we have, through which the Executive sends money as a support in the face of these aggressions. There are about 19 million Venezuelans registered, because this economic aggression also has an attack on the currency that must be explained, in which Colombia is involved, so to confront that attack to the Venezuelan salary, the president, the Government, from time to time, sends a money aid to alleviate this situation.
So I think that is the reason. We have not abandoned either the Venezuelan people or the political principles that we inherited from Commander Chávez at any time, despite all the aggression. I think that is what keeps us as the main political force in the country.
