Henri Falcón was soon to learn how chavista justice works. In the midst of his separation from the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), the Governor of Lara attempted to initiate action before the Supreme Court and paid dearly for it.
On July 14, 2010, the Political-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court heard the case filed by Falcón, who reported the illegality of the provisions of the Organic Law of the Federal Council of Government, arguing that they “threatened the state and municipal autonomy” and reduced the funds for municipal and state governments.
Falcón, who left the PSUV and took a critical position against President Hugo Chávez in early 2010, said that the government battered the concepts of federalism and decentralisation set forth in the Constitution, while giving wings to a “popular power” that “doesn’t exist” and consequently, “cannot be part of the territorial political decentralisation.”
Lara governor’s explanations could not stop the TSJ red steamroller. Appealing to technicalities and in a presentation by Justice Evelyn Marrero Ortiz, the Political-Administrative Court dismissed the request of the former chavista militant.
With this ruling, the judges supported Chávez’s decision, who in an article published on February 21, 2010, following the enactment of the Organic Law of the Federal Government Council, said: “The Venezuelan territorial reality must be transformed and therefore, the need to set up a new geometry of power that becomes a people-based, communal and socialist reorganisation of the geopolitics of the nation.”
Although most of the country rejected a proposed for constitutional amendment on December 2, 2007, which proposed the creation of a “communal State”, the “people power” and the “new geometry of power,” the Venezuelan president said that the Organic Law of the Federal Government Council would “dismantle of entire corroded colonial structure on which a territorial organisation was created to shatter national unity. And of course the People Power will play a major role, I would say an essential role, in the radical transformation of our territory.”
In spite of Chávez’s ideas and the endorsement by the Supreme Court, Article 4 of the Constitution states: “The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is a decentralised federal state.”
Extract of the judgment
[The petitioners] only claimed the alleged impact on the assets of the state of Lara if the Rules of the Organic Law of the Federal Council were enforced. The petitioners failed to indicate expressly and objectively and based on specific technical studies, how the state of Lara would be affected (…) so the Court can appreciate the impact of the implementation of the changes introduced by the provisions under claim (…)