Counterfeited voters’ registers and subjected electoral judges are proof of the existence of dictatorships

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) Twenty-first century dictatorships in the Americas are vote-catching dictatorships.  Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua manipulate electoral results with fraud and are constrained by their inability to sustain the narrative of having an inexistent popular backing.   This is yet one other violation of human rights that has uniformed their methodology of falsifying voters’ registries and controlling judges and other electoral officials.  Flagrant crimes that prove the existence of a dictatorship.

A “vote-catching dictatorship is that regime which concentrates all power into a person or group, represses human rights and basic individual freedoms and imposes and manipulates elections in which the people vote, but do not elect.”  Election means to have “the means to effect something.”

Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights establishes that; “3. The will of the people is the basis of the government’s power over the people, this will shall be expressed through authentic elections that shall be periodically conducted, by means of universal, equal, and secret balloting or other equivalent process that guarantees the freedom of the vote.”

The American Convention on Human Rights, or Treaty of San Jose, mandates in its 23rd Article:  titled “Political Rights, that  1.  All citizens must enjoy the following rights and opportunities.  a).  To participate in the direction of the government’s public affairs, either directly or through representatives freely elected; b) To vote or be elected  in periodic authentic elections, conducted through universal, equal and secret voting that guarantees the free expression of the voters’ will…”

The Inter American Democratic Charter establishes as an essential component of democracy “the conducting of periodic, free, fair elections that are based on universal and secret suffrage as an expression of the people’s sovereignty,” within the framework of “respect for human rights and basic individual freedoms, access to governmental power and the discharge of its duties subject to the rule of law; having a regime with a plurality of political parties and organizations; and the separation of independence of the branches of government” that are some of the other essential components of democracy.

The violation of these rights is perpetrated through the commission of a long litany of crimes based on the total control of power that allows dictatorships to counterfeit the registries of voters empowered to vote, manipulating and altering them to their demographic and quantitative convenience.  They do so with officials and judges who are part of the electoral system who prevaricate and commit crimes by certifying fake registries, disqualifying candidates, certifying counterfeited results, proclaiming and announcing altered results at the service and to the benefit of the dictatorships.

The most noticeable expression of violations of human rights with vote-catching dictatorships’ crimes are public in Cuba -the Dictatorship-In-Chief of the dictatorial system of the 21^st Century Socialism- where people are constrained to vote in a system with one sole party , so the regime can publicize its narrative of having popular backing when it can only sustain itself through State-terrorism, and the complicity of democratic leaders who do not meet their international obligations.

Venezuela’s dictatorship has used and constantly uses this system, even with crimes against humanity.  The world is now witness of the shenanigans of the Venezuelan regime to alter and make the opposition’s internal elections this upcoming 22 October without the intervention of the dictatorships official electoral agency, fail.  Participation of the regime’s official electoral agency is considered a high risk by the opposition because its mission is to prevent the existence of a candidate from the real opposition who –without a doubt- would defeat the dictator.

The flagrant crimes committed by Daniel Ortega, Rosario Murillo and their organized crime’s group in Nicaragua in the so-called “General Elections 2021” and the municipal elections of 2022, are ample proof of the dictatorship’s existence.  The jailing of all candidates from the real opposition so that only “functional opposition’s candidates” can run, the judicialization of political persecution, torture, extortion, falsifications, crimes against humanity and more, are facts that have been documented and ratified with the uprooting and deportation of 222 political prisoners and the repression of the people to continue jailing and torturing them.

Bolivia’s general elections in 2020 that yielded Luis Arce as the landslide winner with an absolute majority of votes, is part of this system that was applied with the complicity of the interim president, her government, and the functional opposition who used the dictatorship’s altered Voters’ Registry, used government officials incapable of becoming whistle-blowers and incapable of denouncing the existence of constitutionally suppressed universal suffrage rights  by the Plurinational State’s constitution.  When all the dust settled and using the entire dictatorial Judicial System, they gave back the Executive Power to the dictatorship.  With the ensuing and unmanageable uproar and discontentment “the dictator resigned and fled but not the dictatorship” he cameback with its electoral falsification apparatus and now “there will be new elections under the dictatorship.”

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