Castrochavist plurinational state to destroy America’s nations

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) The Constituent Assembly is the mechanism that the 21st Century Socialism or Castrochavism, uses to wreck the democratic institutionalism in America’s countries and to impose its strategy to install the “Plurinational State” acknowledging the existence of several nations within the one same State and fractioning the “nation” to destroy its identity and national unity. The concept of Plurinational State is a freakish Castrochavist creation through which it installs divisiveness and permanent confrontation to destroy the nation.

The concept of “plurinational” is an attack weapon against democracy. To do this, they firmly believe the State is comprised by several different nations, they manipulate the concept of “nation” to substitute it with one related to culture, ignoring the fact that, starting with their constitutions and independence, each and every State has forged a nation with its own sense of unity and identity. After over 200 years of independence and existence, each State has -as its foundation- one nation, not several. Castrochavism’s trap consists of supplanting what is “pluricultural” something already integrated into the national whole with the “plurinational” that creates divisiveness and confrontation. It is not the same to have a nation with unity in its cultural diversity than to have several nations within one same State.

Culture is the “set of ways of living and customs, knowledge, and degree of artistic, industrial development in an era, within a social group…”. Culture is the “set of material and spiritual goods of a group transmitted from generation to generation, in order to guide the individual and collective practices that include language, processes, ways of living, customs, traditions, habits, values, patterns, tools and knowledge”.

A nation is the social concept of a state’s organization, something that in-turn is a political concept. A nation is the “set of people from the same origin that generally speak the same language, they have a common tradition in a determined territory”. A diversity of authors multiplies the definitions from different perspectives, whether these be philosophic or ideologic, we all accept that a nation, in the broadest sense, “is a populational community with a territory it considers to be sovereign and with its own cultural identity”. The territory is something essential to the nation.

Plurinational means “multiple nations” and as a confrontational proposal it is presented as “the political principle that enables all nations that exist within one State to strive to have a full-fledge exercise of their rights”, something that basically is a strategy to break-up the State, because there can be no nation without its own territory.

The plurinational’s approach, in this 21st century, is to pretend to ignore the existence of an Argentinean nation, a Chilean nation, a Peruvian nation, a Brazilian nation, an Ecuadorian nation, a Uruguayan nation, a Colombian, Bolivian, Paraguayan nation, and to ignore each and everyone of the national nations in any State of the Americas, replacing them with the confrontation between multiple nations that exist in the territory of those States.

Ecuador was the first State declared to be plurinational by the Constitution of 2008, drafted by Rafael Correa’s “Constituent Assembly”. It declares Ecuador to be “a constitutional State with rights and social justice, democratic, sovereign, independent, unitary, intercultural, plurinational, and secular”, yet organized as a “Republic” -something that mitigated the damage- albeit not the confrontation.

The most inclusive and oldest public portrayal of the “plurinational” concept is Bolivia where Evo Morales supplanted the “Republic of Bolivia” with a “Plurinational State” recognizing the existence of 36 sovereign nations to disintegrate the “Bolivian nation”. Evo Morales supplanted the “Republic of Bolivia” with laws that violate human rights, with the counterfeiting of the system to reform the constitution, with bloody massacres, political prisoners and political exiles, with a functional opposition and the supplantation of the proposed text drafted by his own Constituent Assembly. This is how Castrochavism has constitutionally replaced the class warfare with the struggle of nations, races, or regions, thus propelling the premise of the Forum from Sao Paolo “to multiply the axis of confrontation”.

Hugo Chavez’s Constituent Assembly gave rise to Venezuela’s Constitution of 1999, previous to the development of the plurinational. It circumvents the treatment of the “nation” and recognizes it as a “Federal State”. It turns out that the federal organization -albeit formal and inefficient- restricts the use of the plurinational concept as a discourse.

With this same methodology, the nations of Peru and Chile are now under pressure. The strategic approach to install a “plurinational State” is transnational and it seeks to destroy the Peruvian and Chilean nations so that a permanent confrontation within each can be instituted instead.

*Attorney & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.

Translated from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas