Venezuela Opposition Goes Extreme on Eve of Maduro’s Constituent Assembly

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has announced that elections to the Constituent Assembly will take place in July. In the meantime, the country’s opposition is becoming more and more violent, denying each and every initiative presented by the contested president.

Dr. Francisco Dominguez, head of the Centre for Brazilian and Latin American Studies at Middlesex University, told Sputnik's Brian Becker that he views the situation in Venezuela as the consequence of the failure of the US "deep state," or "state apparatus," as he calls it. According to Dominguez, forces in Washington have come to the conclusion that the years-long "economic war" against Venezuela has failed, and now these forces desperately need some "dramatic event" to serve as a pretext for outright military intervention.

In the meantime, Maduro has shared more details on the upcoming Constituent Assembly — the body that will write the new constitution for the state.

​The Assembly will include 540 members from all classes, from Venezuelan fishermen to businessmen. Cominguez pointed out that members of the Assembly are not expected to rewrite the whole Constitution from scratch, but rather expand the existing one, in order to ensure that the principles of the Bolivarian Revolution are "entrenched" in the new document.

Upcoming local elections will elect new governors and mayors throughout the country as well — a move that the opposition has long demanded, with several dozen people even being killed in protests over perpetually postponed elections. Now that Maduro announced these elections, however, the opposition-controlled National Assembly fiercely rejected the call, Dominguez noted.

"The opposition is getting itself in a corner, and the only thing that is left is basically bullying, trying to get international intervention as well as getting more and more violence, which is completely insane," Dominguez said, noting there are already people in the streets, causing destruction and mayhem.

The National Assembly also opposes the Constituent Assembly, despite the fact that they called for it earlier.

According to Dominguez, the opposition, with support from Washington, has gained so much momentum, they "don't know how to retreat." The only solution they know is going more and more extreme.

"The dynamics that are created within the current of their coalition is ‘the more extreme you are, the more likely you to be heard from Washington,'" Dominguez said.

Even if there are clearer minds out there, Dominguez posited, their voice of reason is completely silenced by the deafening calls to extreme measures by others.