Last week the government of Venezuela decided, after a vote of its elected General Assembly and the approval of the executive, to add 12 new justices to its 20- member Supreme Court. Human Rights Watch denounced the move as a "severe blow to judicial independence" and the Miami Herald said Venezuela "stands at the brink of being an elected dictatorship."
These allegations are unfounded. Imagine, if you can, that a group of military officers in the United States overthrew our elected President, dissolved our elected Congress and Supreme Court, and abolished the Constitution. Now imagine that democracy is restored but the Supreme Court rules that the officers who kidnapped the President and overthrew the government cannot be tried for any crime. That is what happened in Venezuela.
Our Congress would certainly use its constitutional powers to impeach that Supreme Court. So it should not be surprising that Venezuela's General Assembly, where pro-government parties hold a slight majority, would do the same thing by legally "packing" the court with new judges.
Personally, I favor an independent judiciary. But Venezuela -- like much of Latin America -- has never had such a thing, and to pretend that it did and is now losing it, is quite misleading.
Such exaggerations, many of which appear almost daily in the press, have created an astoundingly false impression of Venezuela among Americans. Most Americans think of the country is some kind of quasi-dictatorship "ruled" by the "authoritarian" Hugo Chavez. In fact President Chavez has considerably less power than our own president.
Freedom of speech, the press, assembly and other political freedoms prevail. In fact these compare favorably to the United States, where journalists are being thrown in jail for refusing to reveal their sources, and broadcast stations are fined for violating decency standards. Venezuela's mass media is possibly the most virulently (and often dishonestly) anti- government media in the entire world.
Most of the media is explicitly part of the opposition and supported the April 2002 coup.
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