Casting ballots under a dictatorship are not elections

By: Carlos Sánchez Berzaín - 19/03/2024

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Supplanting the will of the peoples through elections in which there is neither freedom, nor the rule of law, are not “elections.” This is only the methodology imposed by dictators to counterfeit their narrative of legality. To vote without being able to “elect,” to vote without freedom and without legality, are only part of the crimes and State-terrorism with which the regimes from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia violate human rights.

The need of every 21st Century Socialism dictatorship to pretend to have the popular backing of the constituency -something they do not have- and “win elections” to keep the simulation of democracy, has birthed the concept of “vote-catching dictatorships.” They simulate elections and make them obviously “rigged” elections with results that are manipulated through crimes that violate human rights, counterfeit results, and include supplantation, coercion, extortion, accusations, false allegations, undue imprisonment, torture, and more.

A vote-catching dictatorship is “the regime that concentrates absolute power onto a person, group, or organization, represses human rights and individual basic freedoms, imposes and manipulates the casting of ballots as electoral events in which the people vote but do not elect.”

To vote but not elect is the essence of the vote-catching dictatorship. It is to go to the ballot boxes without the possibility of electing candidates that have been; disqualified, are imprisoned, exiled, or assassinated. It is to vote as an obligation but not as a citizen’s right, when the dictatorship uses the results as validation of a regime that suppresses the people’s freedom and criminally crushes the possibility of “electing.”

We can no longer keep calling “elections” to the process of voting but not electing. When the citizenry votes without being able to elect we are facing the process of “voting under a dictatorship,” an integral part of State-terrorism. The essence of an election -as its name implies- is to elect, in other words “to choose or to prefer someone” and that is precisely what dictatorships prevent from happening.

Basically, for the casting of ballots to be a genuine election there must be freedom and the rule of law. Freedom, meaning as “the empowerment of the people to elect, in a responsible manner, their own ways of behavior within their society.” Freedom can only exist within the framework of the “rule of law” that is “the system in which all persons, institutions, and public or private organizations, including the State itself, are obliged to comply with fair, impartial, equitable laws, and have the right to the equal, unbiased, protection of the law.”

The rule of law supposes and guarantees there to be universal suffrage practices, the separation and independence of the branches of government, and a plural regime of political parties and organizations, that are the components for the existence and practice of freedom.

Twenty-First Century Socialism, or Castrochavism, in its narrative attempting to legalize its dictatorships in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, pretends for manipulated elections to be seen and understood as democracy. It attempts to set dictators as legal notwithstanding the fact they were elected in regimes with political prisoners, exiles, tortured, assassinated, and subjected to State-terrorism.

The eagerness for the legalization of dictators has to do with international recognition and the subsequent empowerment of representation on behalf of the States wherein they wield power. Simulating elections and supplanting them with the casting of ballots under a dictatorship, the regimes from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia have been able -thus far- to keep the representation of the countries they repress, have turned into narco-States, and centers of conspiracy against democracy and peace.

In Cuba, people are obliged to vote in a system of “a sole party.” In Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, the concepts of “universal and secret suffrage” based on the equality of all citizens has been eliminated. In all texts of the so-called Constitutions of 21st Century Socialism, they have imposed differences and privileges that, by default, make equality of all citizens disappear and grant greater representation to those sectors they manipulate, with control of the results that either reward or punish the people therein.

The “casting of ballots under a dictatorship” incorrectly referred to as the 2021 elections in Nicaragua, was the chronicle of a long litany of crime with which the dictatorship has presented to the world a tragicomedy that resulted in his misappropriation of a victory with 75.92% of votes, with five functional opposition candidates, over 222 political prisoners afterwards uprooted and deprived of their citizenry. A preposterous counterfeiting by a still in existence dictator that has over 80% of popular rejection.

The dictatorship from Venezuela, benefitted for its subsistence by the so-called “Barbados Agreement,” openly breaches such accord and is now repeating the Nicaraguan tragicomedy, to be able to perpetuate dictator Nicolas Maduro in power. The initial crimes consist of manipulating the disqualification of the sole candidate of the opposition Maria Corina Machado in order to foster the re-creation of a “functional opposition” and be able to “cast ballots in a dictatorship” but not elections.

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

Translation from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas

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