by Vijay Prashad / December 10th, 2020
Madhuri Shukla (USA),
Wring, 2020
The night before the National Assembly elections in Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro spoke to a group of visitors at Miraflores Palace in Caracas. He recounted how he had been a member of the Constituent Assembly, which was formed in 1999 and set up the legal framework for Venezuela’s political system. Maduro told the visitors that he had been a member of the National Assembly during its first and second terms (2000-2005 and 2005-2010 respectively), and he was the president of the National Assembly during its second term before being asked to take on the post of foreign minister. During the election of the National Assembly’s fourth term (2015-2020), the Socialist Unity Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which he leads, lost the majority in the National Assembly ‘because we made mistakes’, he told me. ‘Let’s be clear’.