The constant defense of our sovereignty

Published at: 08/12/2023 11:53 AM

Five centuries have passed since Christopher Columbus arrived in America and it is still fighting incessantly to maintain its sovereignty and independence from European and American empires; today we see how Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States continue in their colonial pretensions to steal wealth and territory from our Peoples; for this reason, once again, the Homeland calls us to defend our sovereignty.

If we review sovereignty as a concept, we find that it is a democratic practice in which the power of their territory is granted to the population, who apply that power through delegation to representative bodies and institutions.

Now, the exercise of sovereignty in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is participatory and leading, because, as expressed in its Constitution, it offers full power to the citizens of the country, and in this way the population is in charge of decision-making and the composition of the organs of power, with a certain voluntary degree of representation.

We can review this in its article 5, which reads: “Sovereignty resides non-transferably in the people, who exercise it directly in the manner provided for in this Constitution and in the law, and indirectly, through suffrage, by the bodies that exercise public power. The organs of the State emanate from popular sovereignty and are subject to it.”

According to this, sovereignty refers to the exercise of authority in a certain territory and this authority falls to the people and although people do not carry out a direct exercise of it, but rather delegate that power to their representatives, it is a power of total competence. This principle points out that the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is the foundation or the main basis of our legal system, so there is no rule that is above it.

However, the insistence of empires to occupy us is intended to violate not only the domestic legal norm, but also international law; it is not only with our country, we have a close example with the case of the Falkland Islands in Argentina, which the British Crown has been occupying illegally for 190 years.

And in this case, the behavior of international organizations has been just as weak with respect to the interests of Peoples, since the United Nations (UN), until now, only invites us to resolve the dispute without other actions to put an end to the occupation.

However, during the revision of the concepts of sovereignty and independence, and the need for them to be protected by the People, we bring the thinker Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, known as the Count of Sieyès (1748-1836), who was one of the inspirers of the French Revolution and who paid special attention to the social problems of his time and explained that “The people have two dimensions: It is, on the one hand, the aggregation of all and each of the individuals in a society, which constitutes, in short, nothing more than a group of individuals, but when that group of individuals (the people) has a political unity, we can no longer speak of a people, but rather we must speak of the people as a political community”.

In this way, seen then as a political community, the attribution of ownership of sovereignty resides with the people and whoever they choose or designate for their defense.

Later, Sieyès adds that “on the other hand, what is the people as a political community must be addressed? It will then be the people's decision to form a political unit that must be accompanied by the fact of forming a cultural unit. What characterizes the people as a political unit is the bond that is sustained by the common decision to live together and to take part both in the successes and benefits, and in the responsibilities and failures of building their democracy”.

It is then that we see the political community as a unit, which is not something different from the people, it is the people themselves in their political unity; Sieyès explained this through an analogy: “the orchestra is a group of musicians, the added musicians make an ensemble of musicians, only the will of the musicians to remain and act with unity makes them able to form an orchestra”.

It is then that, in the words of Sieyès, it can be explained that “no matter what way the nation wants; as long as it wants, all forms are good”, the Venezuelan people conceived as a political community, on December 3rd in the exercise of their sovereignty and participated in a Consultative Referendum to express their position, through the vote, regarding the actions to be taken for the early resolution of the dispute and recovery of Guiana Essequiba.

Due to the acceptance of 97% of the proposals planned in the referendum, the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro Moros, announced nine strategic actions to execute the decisions approved by the Venezuelan people in defense of historical rights over the Essequibo.

Among the decisions taken, there was the activation of the debate in the National Assembly (AN) of the Organic Law for the Defense of Guiana Esequiba for discussion and approval as a legal instrument that allows the creation of the new state and the execution of the actions approved by the people in the consultative referendum last Sunday.

Thus, in the words of Deputy Diosdado Cabello, last Tuesday, December 5, in the National Assembly during the preparation of the explanatory memorandum of the bill, he reiterated that “we are not declaring war on anyone, but we have said it a thousand times and we are acting in accordance with the Law and our Constitution to ensure that from our territory, no one will take away an inch, not half a centimeter even”.

This is why it can be said that the principle of sovereignty is that it belongs to the people. The people, in their unity, are the ones who exercise it, being then a political community that decided to forge its own destiny.