VENEZUELA: Bishop Calls for More Open, Representative Democracy

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Marquez

CARACAS, Jul 7 1995 (IPS) - The country could be facing an explosive situation if the Venezuelan democratic system does not become more open, credible and participative, the president of the Episcopal Conference, Bishop Mario Moronta of Caracas, warned this week.

“A ‘Salvadorisation’ of the country could be generated, a kind of selective civil war, and temptations of radically violent options and assaults on power could be turned to as outlets,” he said.

Speaking with foreign reporters, Moronta said he is concerned about the lack of belief in democracy and dialogue that growing sectors of Venezuelan society have expressed.

A Gallup Poll released this week revealed that 59 percent of Venezuelans were unsatisfied with their democracy in interviews carried out last April.

And 86 percent of those surveyed by the Omnibus company in June said they wanted to live in a democracy, but 81 percent specified “in a better democracy than this one.”

Dialogue in Venezuela was easier during the government of former President Carlos Andres Perez (1989-93), Moronta told foreign journalists.

“With Caldera, there is easy access to him as an individual, but the government atmosphere was better before,” he added.

Coming from a bishop, such an opinion is significant because Perez, who behaves as an agnostic in religious terms, is a social democrat. Caldera, as well as being a practicing Catholic, was the founder and leader for half a century of the Christian Socialist COPEI party (which he later abandoned).

“If the leftist guerrilla struggle of the 1960s had been carried out in today’s social and political conditions, it would have triumphed,” stated Moronta.

Instead of “opening” democracy, which returned on the local scene in 1958 after the fall of the military regime, to make it more representative and participative, “the leadership opted to strengthen the top levels of society.

“Now we are paying the consequences, and we are at a moment in which a democratic opening is indispensable, for that 59 percent which doesn’t believe. What is needed is what we could call a conversion of the leaders, that they stop shutting themselves upstairs.”

If such a conversion of the country’s leaders does not occur, “may God help us” said the bishop, warning of the risk of some sectors of society opting for violence.