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In Caracas on Sunday Venezuelan Assassin in Chief Nicolas Maduro abandoned his last pretense of legitimacy and commenced open warfare on democracy. Ignoring the heavy losses of his legislative allies in the December 2015 legislative elections (which transpired despite corrupt rulings by the electoral commission and Maduros best efforts at committing election fraud), ignoring widespread protests, and a massive vote (an estimated 7.2 million people participated) against his continued lawless rule in a July 16 plebiscite called by Venezuelas Congress, Maduro staged a sham election on July 30 for a Constituent Assembly, consisting of lackeys, apologists, and hangers on.

Even the rules for his unconstitutional Constituent Assembly are undemocratic, the fiction being that it represents sectors of society rather than individuals. Under this guise supporters were given multiple votes, cast under their various guises as citizen, farmer, so forth, and just for good measure districts containing supporters were vastly overrepresented. As it transpired, Maduro was able to hustle, bully, and cajole an estimated 2.3 million people to the polls, though the lackey Maduro put in charge of the National Election Council, Tibisay Lucena, claimed a much higher turnout. Maduros ersatz vote has been denounced by governments across the region, including Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Panama, which issued sanctions. The European Union? It questions the results. For its part, the United States Treasury Department hit Maduro with sanctions on Monday and national security adviser H.R. McMaster said in a statement, Maduro is not just a bad leader, he is now a dictator.

The Venezuelan people are a courageous lot, committed to government of the people, by the people and for the people, but they are now fighting a man who holds power at gunpoint: More than 100 Venezuelans have died in anti-Maduro demonstrations over the past months, mostly at the hands of Venezuelan police and army sharp shooters, yes Army General and Maduro lackey Jose Rafael Torrealba Perez ordered the use of snipers against protesters, and at least 10 more people died the day of Maduros sham vote. Maduro has effectively declared war on democracy, and it is now time for the regions democracies to bring this wretched criminal to heel.

How did matters reach such an extreme? In the late 1990s, temporarily low oil prices and endemically corrupt political parties left the public both cynical and exasperated. In their frustration they elected a charismatic outsider as president: former coup participant and former Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chavez. In that case the medicine turned out to be worse than the disease.

Chavez adopted increasingly heavy-handed and repressive measures, all in the name of bringing the supposed marvels of socialism to the people of Venezuela. It is the habit of totalitarian leaders to rename their countries, Burma became Myanmar, China the Peoples Republic of China, and in short order Chavez rechristened his country The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. More than just a quaint conceit, the Bolivarian label is part of a made-in-Cuba version of the Monroe Doctrine. In the early 19th century as the countries of Spanish America became independent, Simon Bolivar sought to unite them into one republic. Todaythe Cubans and their allies in Venezuela and elsewhere use the Bolivarian label to justify Cuban intervention in other Latin American countries, while they use the same framework to denounce the regions defenders of freedom when seek help from their democratic allies in the US, Spain, and other countries outside Latin America on the grounds that it invites foreign meddling in the region.

Not only was Chavez heavy handed, he was also as incompetent at wielding power as he was effective at seizing it. In the march of but a few years Chavez managed to run the state oil company PDVSA into insolvencybereft of the chemical engineers and managers Chavez had fired for their political beliefs, the company was plagued by refinery explosions, fires, and general mismanagement. Production fell. Meanwhile, Chavez hounded entrepreneurs into bankruptcy with selective enforcement, taxes, regulations and outright seizures. The economy cratered.

As the economy faltered the attentions of Venezuelan President for Life Hugo Chavez were focused elsewhere. He managed to rewrite the constitution, and to subvert the courts by appointing jurisprudential lackeys to key posts. Where he fell short was in his attempts to win over the legislature: Despite Chavezs best efforts to quash the count, the public continued to elect opposition figures to Congress, and to vote them in as mayors as well. While members of Venezuelas Congress enjoy immunity from prosecution, mayors do not. With the judiciary in his back pocket, Chavez set about imprisoning as many mayors as he could on trumped up charges. He also subverted the elections commission and set them to the task of disqualifying as many elected opposition legislators as possible. In April 2002 the former coup plotter was himself the target of a failed military uprising, during which he was briefly detained by the coup plotters. The uprising failed and Chavez used the occasion to remove his remaining enemies and to consolidate his hold over the military which until recently has been exceedingly docile despite the ongoing collapse of Venezuelan society.

Chavez also sought to bankrupt the opposition media through a variety of subterfuges, such as not placing government ads in newspapers he disliked. One particularly outrageous abuse took advantage of a provision in the broadcast lawsin those days Chavez still needed to work around the lawsthat required the television networks to cover the president without commercial interruption when he addressed the nation. Of course, few people are as fond of talking as was Chavez. At a summit meeting in 2007 it took the king of Spain asking him why he didnt quiet down to make him stop talking. Alas King Juan Carlos wasnt there to stop Chavez as he turned his television prerogative into a daily occurrence, converting his addresses into a regular, commercial free, television program, Alo Presidente, that had to be carried commercial free during prime time, thereby starving the independent television networks of their primary source of advertising revenue, and driving them into bankruptcy. When he got tired of talking, hed play his guitar or invite viewers to call in.

Just as totalitarians like to rename their countries, so too it is their wont to find a particular stupid underling with exceptionally weak leadership skills to appoint as their potential successor. Dictators who ignore this rule often find themselves being succeeded ahead of time by the bright energetic underling they had inadvertently chosen to take their place, and the retirement package for dictators can involve being shot at close range, as Libyas Ghadaffi discovered to his brief but very intense chagrin. Chavez was certainly evil, but he was not stupid, and so he picked someone who was as his vice president: Nicolas Maduro. This might not have been such as problem if, after contracting cancer while he was still in his 50s, Chavez had not placed himself under the care of Cuban doctorsimagine taking the people running the NTSB security post at a small U.S. airport and handing them scalpels and surgical glovesand so in short order, Chavez died of his cancer and Nicolas Maduro became Venezuelas not very competent, not terribly bright authoritarian ruler.

Maduro turned out to be even worse than Chavez at running the economy. After imposing currency controls, and fixing prices he accused businesses that could not operate at the controlled prices of hoarding, and had them taken over and their owners jailed. Worst of all are the food shortages that are endemic to Maduros Bolivarian republic and have stunted the growth and cognitive development of a generation of Venezuelan children. To be sure, the list of particulars against Maduro is very long indeed, and his criminal state seems to have reached its tentacles into narcotics trafficking and a connection with Iranian terror as well.

By December 2015 even some of Chavezs most fanatical followers had had enough, and the opposition won a veto-proof majority in Congress, a majority that Maduros National Election Council went to work shrinking by blocking the seating of enough legislators to restore Maduros veto. The public became increasingly frustrated with Venezuelas enforced poverty, and with Maduros obstruction, while Maduro made an increasingly bald sequence of attempts to dissolve Congress. The number of political prisoners mounted, in a particularly barbaric move, Maduro dispatched 100 policemen in riot gear to City Hall to arrest Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma on trumped-up charges. He joined dozens of other mayors held behind bars under appalling conditions. Soon after his fellow political prisoners Leopoldo Lopez and Daniel Ceballos began a hunger strike demanding freedom for the political prisoners, and a free election for a new government. The hunger strike ended with the physical collapse of Ceballos and a government promise of elections.

In March 2017 Maduros puppet Supreme Court declared that the National Assembly was dissolved, and that it would take over the legislative functions of the assembly. The streets erupted in protest, and a long list of military officers issued a public statement of disapproval. Even Maduros chief public prosecutor, Luisa Ortega, who had participated in some of Maduros worst travesties of justice, publicly objected to the measure. Maduro backed down, but the street protests did not stop and have continued to this day. Despite violent mistreatment by the police, and the death of more thanthan 100 demonstrators, the protests have become a regular occurrence.

Of course, not all of the Venezuelan military have been as trigger happy as Maduro stooge Jose Rafael Torrealba Perez, and so as many as 85 military officers have been imprisoned by the Maduro regime for refusing to join in the brutal repression. Confronted by an unstoppable wave of protest Maduro celebrated May Day by calling a non-democratic July 30 election for a corporatist convention empowered to ratify the replacement of Chavezs constitution with a dictatorship led by Nicolas Maduro. This convention, which Maduro calls a Constituent Assembly, has no basis in the Venezuelan constitution, and even the basis for voting, which does not treat all citizens equally, is nondemocratic.

The international community has been slow to condemn Maduros authoritarian abuses, but the outrages have reached such an extent that even the community of nations has perked up. In principle the Treaty of San Jose and the charter of the Organization of American States (OAS) establishes Latin America as a region of mutually supporting democracies, with articles obliging countries to come to the aid of people afflicted by authoritarian rulethis was part of the basis for the boycott of Cuba. Secretary General of the OAS Luis Amalgro has worked hard to extract a resolution from the OAS general assembly condemning Maduros dictatorial moves in general and the Constituent Assembly in particular, and in May the organization considered a motion from Canada, Mexico, Panama Peru, and the United States to do just that.

To carry the motion needed a super-majority, which it barely failed to achieveonly Nicaragua is reported to have voted against, but enough nations abstained to block the measure. Those abstaining included the ALBA states, a small group of countries whose governments support Maduros anti-democratic orientation. The ALBA includes not just Nicaragua and Venezuela but also Bolivia and Ecuador. Also abstaining were many of the Caribbean micro states which depend on Venezuela for petroleum, and perhaps also for bribe money. Amalgro has continued his principled campaign against the Maduro regime, recently announcing that he will file charges against Maduro in the International Criminal Court for human rights violations against the Venezuelan people.

On the eve of the fraudulent July 30 vote former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe called upon the Venezuelan army to overthrow Maduro and act as a caretaker government, holding quickly free and fair elections, and then stepping down. ALBA is the Spanish acronym for the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America. And so we arrive at the end of July with Nicolas Maduro in open violation of the Venezuelan constitution, and the laws of human decency, openly mocking the democratic charter, which he dismisses obscenelybathroom humor being the one literary avenue open to this man of little intellect and even less moral stature. What comes next? Will Venezuela become another Cuba, with other countries in the region disapproving the brutal actions of its government, while taking only token measures to intervene? Will what is left of the Venezuelan military join the public to put an end to Maduro and to restore democracy? Will the other countries provide more than a show of disapprobation? One thing is clear, the criminal Nicolas Maduro negotiates in bad faith, and he will not cease his usurpation save at gunpoint. Meanwhile everyone seems ready for someone else to act, wringing our hands and paraphrasing Henry II of England: Will no one rid me of this nettlesome beast? Alas, the latter day versions of Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy and Richard le Breton appear to be otherwise engaged.

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Maduro's War on Democracy - The Weekly Standard