Crimes against humanity in Venezuela

Since Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, and installed in 1999, a range of crimes have been perpetrated by the regime. The first was a judicial coup d’état in 1999 when democratically elected president dissolved the Constitution. The second was the gradual handing over of national sovereignty to Cuba, now complete with the installation of non-venezuelan citizen Nicolás Maduro as the Cuban puppet dictator in Caracas. However, infinitely more serious are the Crimes Against Humanity committed starting in 2002, and still ongoing.

The first of these Crimes Against Humanity was a deliberate slaughter of civilians on April 11, 2002, and the second – and still ongoing – is the political Apartheid against dissenters. We are not talking about tens or hundreds or thousands of individuals; we are talking about more than three million people who have systematically been denied their human rights for 10 years.

Murder and extermination

Let’s start with April 11, which the regime calls a “military coup”. It was a million person march in protest of the president’s policy. It was organized by the employers and the trade unions together. The march was far from the political center of power. Through my research I’ve found out what really happened. I’ve interviewed organizers, participants, an officer in the honor guard, an officer on duty who disobeyed the order from the president to deploy the military, one of the assassins, and one officer–who apart from being a Venezuelan military officer also is a Cuban intelligence agent–whose job it is to make the world believe it was a pre-planned military coup, by acting and speaking like he was involved in the planning of the military coup.

People in the march all say that the call to march to the presidential palace Miraflores came from within the march, not from the leaders. The only reasonable explanation is that the regime sent agitators to the march, because people don’t act like that spontaneously, especially not Venezuelans. In all the cases I have observed in that country, only when infiltrated agitators stir up the crowd does it change its plans (and it happens every now and then).

Earlier, Freddy Bernal, mayor of Caracas, had recruited some of the city’s employees, young men in desperate situations, to be snipers stations on the rooftops around Miraflores. These are rooftops where the honor guard have snipers to protect the president during official acts, so nobody else has access but the regime. However, this day there were no honor guard snipers since there was no official event, and the march was far away. The young men were given sniper rifles and forced to consume cocaine. Regime supporters were also rallied around Miraflores, and a small “field hospital” was set up. When the march approached Miraflores it was close to the point where Avenida Baralt passes below Avenida Urdaneta. Regime supporters were on this second street. Some time here the snipers opened fire. Not only marchers but also regime supporters were hit. Persons in the top echelons of the regime also opened fire, from Avenida Urdaneta down on Avenida Baralt. Police on Avenida Urdaneta tried to stop the march in vain. Police officer Simonovis, later convicted to 30 years of prison, was trying to stop the march and warn it that the regime had prepared an ambush for it up ahead, but the march continued until it was fired upon. The police on Avenida Urdaneta tried to protect the people, fired back at those they perceived were shooting at the crowd. The regime supporters on Avenida Urdaneta who were caught on video shooting down on Avenida Urdaneta were given medals. The police who defended the lives of the innocent civilians were given 30 years in jail.

The calculation of the regime was that they would be able to control the situation. The event was designed to quell any future desire to protest. To once and for all do away with the willpower of the people. However, when Chávez (I won’t call him president, he was a triple coupster, dictator, and quisling, a bigger quisling than Quisling himself), when this quisling ordered the activation of Plan Avila, the military contingency plan to quell a popular uprising, the military refused. One after the other refused to take the call from Chávez. The regime’s plan of how to get away with it involved taking control of the media message, by ordering a “cadena” (as in ‘network’, the government making all stations part of its network). In Latina America (and this should be changed!) the president typically has the power to command all television stations to broadcast an official message live. So Chávez started talking about nonsense on the air, while people fell to the ground outside from the sniper’s bullets. However, here came the second unexpected behavior that day: The private television stations made a split screen, and also ran a ticker on the bottom of the screen, so they got the news out in spite of the “cadena”. This caused national outrage and Chávez eventually resigned. That’s why the regime calls it a military coup. Here’s the thing, though: The officer who wrote the resignation letter, and who has it in his possession with Chávez’s handwritten resignation on the back, is a Cuban agent. His job is to make the world believe that it actually was a military coup. It wasn’t. The resignation was premeditated to allow him to come back with a free pass. He was brought back to days later by general Baduel (who was the only co-conspirator of the Feb 4, 1992 military coup who betrayed Chávez and did not participate in the coup; he later became minister of defense but was then thrown in jail where he still sits).

The crime against humanity was to deliberately lead civilians into an ambush and slaughter them. It constitutes a crime against humanity of murder as described in article 7 (1) (a) and or crime against humanity of extermination as described in article 7 (q) (b).

Later in 2002 a group of military officers made a long occupation of Plaza Altamira in protest against the regime, but the occupation was terminated when a sniper opened fire on the civilians. That assassin is now a diplomat in Costa Rica, if my memory does not fail me. Since the act was perpetrated as part of a systematic attack, it, too, should be considered a crime against humanity.

Persecution and apartheid

After the 2002 events the civil society started collecting signatures for a presidential recall referendum. This was a long and arduous process, in which the regime repeatedly rejected the collected signatures, and put up difficult demands, but they were eventually all met and the recall referendum was held in August of 2004. The “yes” vote got about 60% of the votes, but the regime committed electronic election fraud (this has been proven beyond any doubt through a number of scientific papers in international peer-reviewed journals), and declared that the “no” vote had won with about 60% of the votes. However, they did something much worse: They used the signatures to compile a list of dissidents, the “Lista Tascon” as it’s commonly known.

People on this list have ever since been the target of political Apartheid: They have lost their government jobs. They have lost or not been given subsidies. Any and all action that requires government intervention, the over 3 million people on that list have been systematically discriminated against. That is another crime against humanity: Crime against humanity of persecution as described in Article 7 (1) (h), and or Crime against humanity as apartheid, as described in Article 7 (1) (j).

Mass killing

The regime in Venezuela has deliberately armed, equipped, and supplied criminals for the purpose of increasing the level of crime in the country. The police is forbidden from interfering with the activities of these criminals. This has led to the nation now having the highest murder rate in the world, 79 per 100,000 persons in 2013 according to an independent estimate (the regime figures are notorious for being far too low and no serious observer believes them). They true rate may in fact be much higher than 79, it’s very hard to find out. All in all, at the very least, one hundred thousand persons have been murdered in excess of what would have been the case had not the regime had this policy. That this is deliberate is well proven, and that the present dictator, Maduro, is aware of it and condones it, is beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The recent murder of former Miss Venezuela, a well known actress in USA, Monica Spear, was a direct effect of this policy. The minister in charge tried to turn the blame to her for not having bodyguards. That statement reveals that the regime’s intention is to kill off the middle class: Those who can afford a car but who can’t afford bodyguards. The intention is to turn the country into a two-class society: The ruling “vanguard party”, and a powerless proletariate maintained in ignorance. They want the oil income, and they don’t want to share it with anybody. When I write “they” I mean the Cuban regime and the Venezuelan quislings.

Monica Spear, Miss Venezuela 2004, murdered 2014
Monica Spear, Miss Venezuela 2004, murdered 2014 as yet another victim of the Crimes Against Humanity that Cuba is committing in Venezuela.

Starvation, Homelessness, Robbery

Other crimes include an economic policy designed to not provide food for the people, by destroying the production apparatus and not providing foreign currency with which to buy merchandize abroad. It includes the destruction of all private enterprise. It includes the occupation of private homes by regime supporters – with no possibility whatsoever of getting help from the State.

There is no doubt that a Crime Against Humanity is being perpetrated in Venezuela RIGHT NOW. There is also no doubt that Cuba is the architect of this Crime, and there is no doubt that Cuba is being backed up by Russia. The interest of Cuba is the oil: It needs the Venezuelan oil for the regime in Havana to survive. The interest of Russia is strategic: Venezuela is being converted into the most important satellite state of the new Russian Empire; a military outpost designed to threaten USA from the south. China’s involvement is mainly through financing it seems.

The modern coup d’état: Constituent Assembly

On August 12, 1999, the Constituent Assembly (asamblea nacional constituyente) in Venezuela declared itself above the law, above the constitution, above the parliament, above the president, even above the Supreme Court. They thus broke the constitutional order, which is tantamount to committing a coup d’état. The case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the Constituent Assembly was above the constitution, why they had the power to declare themselves above the law so to say. The Supreme Court decision was clearly outside of its competence.

Writes Gianluigi Palombella in «Constitutional Transformations vs. “Juridical” coups d’ État. A Comment on Stone Sweet»: “according to the common view, when a competent power acts within the limits of its conferring rules, explicates its own tasks within the range of the rules of the game, without asserting a new, previously un-conferred – power for the future, this would be unlikely to be characterized as a coup.” The Venezuelan Supreme Court clearly and blatantly acted outside of its conferring rules, outside the range of the rules of the game, when it conferred all the powers of the existing constitution to an assembly that was not contemplated by the constitution – even it’s own powers. It was a clear-cut coup d’état from a juridical perspective.

How was it possible to get away with such a blatant coup d’état in our day and age? It seems that the coup was “sold” by confusing two terms, thus obfuscating the matter in media. The appropriate assembly would have been a Constitutional Assembly (asamblea constitucional in Spanish), i.e., an assembly tasked with drafting a new constitution to be approved according to the provisions of the existing constitution. This is what was done in Iceland recently, for instance. However, what they did create was a Constituent Assembly (asamblea constituyente).

A constituent assembly is only appropriate when there is no pre-existing constitution, for instance in the French revolution, the Russian revolution, the Venezuelan independence, and the Estonian independence in 1919, since in those cases the previous condition had been a monarchy without a constitution, or a situation of being a part of another State. In contrast, Finland did not hold a constituent assembly after independence, since they had retained the Swedish constitution during the time Finland was a Grand Duchy of Russia. Nor did Estonia hold a constituent assembly at the second independence in 1991 (they instead held a constitutional assembly to write a new constitution). As a final example we can take Iceland: No constituent assembly was held at independence since they continued with the (slightly modified) Danish constitution, until they eventually held a constitutional assembly to modify the constitution without breaking the constitutional order.

It is possible that the similarity between the words “constituent” and “constitutional” has been exploited on purpose in order to confuse, and to get away with the juridical coup d’état en Venezuela in 1999. It is, however, impossible to deny that it was a coup d’état, and that ever since 1999 Venezuela has been ruled by a coupster regime.