Defending Democracy In Venezuela
With time comes challenges and opportunities. For nations, these are social, economic, political and educational. However, as time has progressed, various countries have grown through these challenges and have taken advantage of the opportunities and infinite blessings in their paths.
Sadly, in the case of Venezuela, the last couple of years have brought both challenges and increasing difficulties. The corruption, bad decisions and lack of leadership from the government have gradually lead the entire Venezuelan society into a terrible crisis that gets worse every day.
After more than 15 years of the “Officialdom” rule, Venezuelans are tired. Not only that, but they have exhausted various resources to show their discontent, to make changes and to elect new leaders through democratic means. Meanwhile, the country and its society are slowly crumbling, falling deeper and deeper into inflation.
Now that the most recent attempt of the Venezuelan opposition to elect new leaders fell short and with the economy falling to pieces, Venezuelans are facing hunger due to the lack of food products. People are eating from the garbage and others are ingesting harmful vegetables in the hopes that it will satisfy their appetites and not kill them in the process.
As a result of the precarious conditions in Venezuela, the General Secretary of the “Organization of American Countries” or OEA, Luis Almagro, is pushing for the country’s suspension. Almagro has turned in a report that recommends the suspension of Venezuela if Presidential elections are not held during 2017, if the political prisoners are not liberated and if a humanitarian channel that alleviates the lack of food and medicine is not established to help Venezuelans.
“We recommend to the [American] Estates that if Venezuela is going to laugh at the other 33, the dictatorship of Venezuela is not worthy of living among the Estates that are present in this Organization,” said Almagro.
Almagro knows that each country might take a different amount of time to provide a decision. He commented, “The [American] countries don’t have to rush their decisions. It’s good that they do it according to their own political times. We’ll respect their decisions.”
In Venezuela, the President of the National Assembly, Julio Borges, has said that the Opposition majority will approve a declaration to support the work of Almagro. On Monday, March 20, Almagro held a conference before the OEA in which relatives of the three Opposition leaders who were incarcerated were present. Nevertheless, Almagro was interrupted during the beginning of the conference by the alternative Venezuelan Ambassador, Carmen Velázquez.
“It’s an initiative that solely responds to his agenda of personal hate towards a member Estate,” read Velazquez during the conference.
Lastly, Lilian Tintori, wife of incarcerated opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, was also present in the conference and delivered a few words about Venezuela.
“In Venezuela there is no democracy. There is Dictatorship. Defend Democracy in Venezuela,” said Tintori.
Opinions expressed in this piece are that of the reporter.
