A NEW FRAUD ON THE CONSTITUTION

On November 2, 2007, the National Assembly of Venezuela, following President Chávez's proposals, sanctioned a major constitutional reform to transform the democratic rule-of-law and decentralized social state established in the 1999 Constitution into a socialist, centralized, repressive, and militaristic state. In the referendum for the approval of the constitutional reform on December 2, 2007, the people rejected the proposed reform.

The constitutional reform was intended to transform the most essential and fundamental aspects of the state, making it one of the most important reforms in all of Venezuelan constitutional history. With it, the decentralized, democratic, pluralistic, and social state built and consolidated since the Second World War would have been radically changed to create a socialist, centralized, repressive, and militaristic state grounded in a so-called Bolivarian doctrine, which has been identified with twenty-first-century socialism and an economic system of state capitalism. This reform was sanctioned following the president's proposal, which evaded the procedure established in the Constitution for such fundamental change. Thus, the reform defrauded the Constitution, being sanctioned through a procedure established for other purposes, to deceive the people. That is why it has been qualified as one more step of the “permanent coup d'état” that has occurred in Venezuela.

The most important consequence of this draft reform from citizens' perspective was that, with it, an official state ideology and doctrine was to be formally established in Venezuela.