Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Does Chavez's left hand know what his right hand is doing?
One of the frequent assertions of the Venezuelan opposition, and one picked up by the international media, is that Chavez controls all aspects of power in Venezuela. The National Assembly, the Supreme Court, the Comptroller General, the Attorney General,etc. are nothing but appendages of his will and do nothing but what he tells them to do. If one takes the opposition at its word none of those organizations does so much as sneeze without Chavez telling them to do it.
Keeping that in mind, a very curious thing has happened. Last year the supposedly Chavez controlled National Assembly revised the Venezuelan Penal Code (this revision has been the subject of a lot of false accusations - but that is the subject for another day). Yet several months late the supposedly Chavez controlled Attorney General went to the Supreme Court to ask that those revisions be declared null on the grounds that they violated the Venezuelan constitution and its expansive definition of human rights. Yesterday the Attorney General, Isaías Rodríguez, affirmed that he was continueing with that case to overturn the National Assembly reforms.
So here we have two institutions, the National Assembly and the Attorney General, both supposedly controlled by Chavez, and both working at cross purposes - one passing new laws and the other saying those new laws are unconstitutional and therefore invalid. So what is it - does the left half of Chavez's brain not know what the right half is doing? Or does Chavez maybe not control these bodies after all?
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Keeping that in mind, a very curious thing has happened. Last year the supposedly Chavez controlled National Assembly revised the Venezuelan Penal Code (this revision has been the subject of a lot of false accusations - but that is the subject for another day). Yet several months late the supposedly Chavez controlled Attorney General went to the Supreme Court to ask that those revisions be declared null on the grounds that they violated the Venezuelan constitution and its expansive definition of human rights. Yesterday the Attorney General, Isaías Rodríguez, affirmed that he was continueing with that case to overturn the National Assembly reforms.
So here we have two institutions, the National Assembly and the Attorney General, both supposedly controlled by Chavez, and both working at cross purposes - one passing new laws and the other saying those new laws are unconstitutional and therefore invalid. So what is it - does the left half of Chavez's brain not know what the right half is doing? Or does Chavez maybe not control these bodies after all?
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