VenEconomy: A Continued Coup against Venezuela’s Regional Powers From the Editors of VenEconomy Latin American Herald Tribune August 30, 2014
It is an affront to the dictatorial minds of those who control the Central Government and have taken hold of the rest of Venezuela’s public authorities that leaders from the Democratic Unity (MUD) have been elected to be at the forefront of three governorates, and more than 70 mayoralties.
So much so that, refused to recognize the legitimacy of Henrique Capriles as governor of Miranda state, President Nicolás Maduro decided to give rise to the so-called “Miranda Corporation,” a body that serves as a parallel authority to the governorate in which he appointed Elías Jaua, the PSUV ruling party candidate who lost to Capriles during the regional elections held in December of 2012.
A totally unconstitutional move also embraced by the late Hugo Chávez when Antonio Ledezma won the election for the Caracas Metropolitan Mayor’s office to PSUV’s Juan Barreto in 2008. Then, and only hours after results were announced, Chávez proceeded to arbitrarily and illegally transfer the powers of this mayoralty to other parallel public offices. Subsequently the Government of the Capital District was created and Jacqueline Faría was handpicked by Chávez himself to take the helm with all the resources, staff and powers from the old and legal mayoralty.
The same procedure was applied to Táchira state when César Pérez Vivas from the opposition was the governor, along with other series of mayoralties that did not bow to the interests of the Bolivarian process.
Another way for the State to ignore the legally elected regional and municipal authorities has been that of opening administrative or criminal proceedings, especially against the more rebellious of them. The most extreme cases judicially speaking are those of the mayors of San Cristóbal (Táchira state), Daniel Ceballos, and San Diego (a municipality in Carabobo state), Enzo Scarano, both sentenced to prison and removed from their offices by a ruling of the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ), for allegedly disobeying an order from the TSJ’s Constitutional Chamber in maintaining law and order during a series of student protests taking place between February and March of this year. However, the measure backfired on the PSUV since the wives of both mayors were elected shortly after by an overwhelming majority to replace their spouses in their functions.
At the same time, opposition governors and mayors have been constantly complaining about the long and unjustifiable delays or omissions in the transfer to the regions of their corresponding quota-share of the so-called Constitutional Allocation (the budget allocation for each state/municipality) and that established by the Intergovernmental Fund for Decentralization (Fides) Act.
This week for example, the Caracas Metropolitan Mayor’s office complained that it was left without resources for the payment of the payroll as well as other public services from the month of September, due to the arbitrariness of the Maduro government in not delivering the quota-share to the mayoralty since July 2013.
For its part, the San Cristóbal Mayor’s office has been complaining that a project for the recycling of solid waste promoted by mayoress Ceballos is on tenterhooks, because the National Executive has retained at customs the equipment and trucks that would move forward this project to benefit an entire community.
The true intentions of the Maduro government is to carry on with the construction of a “Communal State,” not established anywhere in the Constitution, and to destroy one of the greatest political achievements of the last half of the 20th century in Venezuela: the decentralization, which made regional rulers come closer to their communities and their true social and economic needs.
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