Ricardo F. Morín Extraction Computer-generated image (CGI) 2026
Ricardo F. Morín
October 12, 2026
On October 12, 2026, the Associated Press identified Elon Musk as the largest known donor in the American midterm elections, reporting contributions exceeding $276 million since July to organizations supporting Republican candidates. Reuters placed his spending across the election cycle at approximately $366 million. This renewed financing follows his intervention in federal administration through the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. His White House service ended in May 2025, and a public rupture with Trump followed in June; the October reporting records their subsequent reconciliation. The sequence brings electoral finance and the exercise of public authority into a common field of inquiry: the person helping to finance continued Republican control also has a direct interest in the scrutiny that Congress may exercise over his previous conduct and his businesses. [1]
The commercial relationship with government predates DOGE. NASA’s award to SpaceX in April 2021 for a lunar landing system, initially valued at $2.89 billion, provides one documented example. Such a contract purchases a specified service and carries obligations on both sides. Its existence establishes a substantial interest in federal decisions; it does not establish an improper award. The commercial stakes became explicit on June 5, 2025, when Trump threatened to terminate federal contracts and subsidies benefiting Musk’s companies. The relationship exposed Musk to executive pressure as well as giving him opportunities for influence. The constitutional concern becomes more acute when a contractor’s chief executive also acquires influence over the administration responsible for public expenditure and helps finance the political majority positioned to examine that administration. [2]
A government becomes extractive insofar as public resources and powers are redirected toward restricted interests while the population bears the resulting costs and loses effective means of correction. Money is one resource. Administrative knowledge, access to confidential information, and the capacity to enforce obligations are others. Extraction can therefore occur through the appropriation of advantages and through the weakening of institutions capable of questioning those advantages. The term identifies a relationship among beneficiaries, burdens, and accountability. Waste alone does not establish that relationship, and a reduction in expenditure does not by itself establish extraction. [3]
The conjunction of Musk’s electoral wealth, commercial interests, and administrative intervention created an unusual concentration of influence. His participation brought a prominent beneficiary of federal contracting into an initiative intended to reshape the federal apparatus. The resulting arrangement gave particular force to a familiar temptation: treating access to political leadership as sufficient warrant to determine which public capacities remain necessary. Commercial success supplied prestige to the intervention. The authority to alter government still depended on public law.
The executive order of January 20, 2025, renamed the United States Digital Service, located the United States DOGE Service within the Executive Office of the President, and provided for DOGE teams inside federal agencies. The order sought extensive access to agency records and systems, subject to law and data protections. A further order on February 11 gave agency DOGE team leaders a role in hiring decisions and directed preparations for large reductions in the workforce. These were mechanisms for intervention across government, with agency heads retaining responsibilities that the orders expressly acknowledged. [4]
Musk’s own position remained difficult to reconcile with the administration’s public presentation of his role. In a sworn declaration filed on February 17, 2025, White House official Joshua Fisher described him as a special government employee and senior presidential adviser, with no independent authority to make government decisions and no position as DOGE administrator. Two days later, Trump publicly described Musk as the person he had put in charge. The discrepancy exposed a problem of attribution: the public was presented with a director of administrative transformation, while the government’s legal account assigned him an advisory function. [5]
That discrepancy matters because accountability depends on identifying who decided, under which authority, and subject to which obligation. Informal influence becomes particularly consequential when it can initiate action without assuming a comparably identifiable responsibility for the result. The presence of an adviser does not dissolve the duties of the officials who receive his advice. The president, agency heads, and Congress retain distinct responsibilities for the actions they authorize, execute, or enact. Musk’s prominence cannot absorb those responsibilities or relieve other participants of them.
The constitutional structure gives Congress legislative and appropriations powers and charges the president with faithful execution of the laws. Administrative discretion operates within that distribution. The distinction acquired concrete importance on August 5, 2025, when the Government Accountability Office concluded that the National Institutes of Health had violated the Impoundment Control Act by withholding funds from obligation and expenditure. GAO addressed the administration’s compliance with enacted appropriations; it did not decide whether the underlying research policies were desirable. The finding concerned HHS and NIH actions within the wider executive program and does not establish Musk’s personal direction of them. [6]
The constitutional injury arises when executive preference displaces a legislative decision without the process that gives a change in the law its authority. A program may be revised, its funding reduced, or its functions reorganized through lawful means. Administrative obstruction can produce comparable practical effects while avoiding the same public deliberation and attribution of responsibility. An institution may continue to exist in statute after it has lost the personnel, procedures, or resources needed to perform its duties. Citizens then retain a legal entitlement to governmental action whose practical means have been impaired.
The language of efficiency can conceal this displacement when expenditure becomes the sole measure of performance. An agency has an operating cost because it performs a function. A reduction in that cost acquires meaning in relation to the function preserved, the obligations fulfilled, and the losses prevented. If the reduction disables those activities, the saving recorded in one account may reappear as a larger burden elsewhere. Political credit for the immediate reduction and public responsibility for the eventual loss can fall on different people.
The Internal Revenue Service provides a measurable example of this problem. In March 2026, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reported that workforce reductions in 2025 had initially produced limited compensation savings because many departing employees remained on paid resignation arrangements through September. The report also cited a Congressional Budget Office estimate that a subsequent $11.7 billion funding rescission would reduce federal revenues by $38.6 billion over 2026–2035. That figure is a projection concerning a congressional funding decision, not an observed total of losses caused personally by Musk. It nevertheless identifies the inadequacy of treating a smaller collection budget as an equivalent improvement in public finances. [7]
Where weakened enforcement allows obligations to go uncollected, the advantage accrues to those who escape payment, while the fiscal consequences pass into public borrowing, taxation, or reduced provision. The law may continue to prescribe the same liabilities. Unequal capacity to enforce them can alter their practical incidence. This is one mechanism through which administrative diminution can serve extraction: a public institution loses the means to secure what the public is legally owed.
At USAID, Musk’s participation was explicit. On February 3, 2025, he publicly announced that work was underway to close the agency and said that Trump agreed. A week later, USAID’s inspector general warned that staffing reductions and the foreign-assistance pause had degraded the agency’s ability to distribute and safeguard humanitarian assistance. The warning concerned $8.2 billion in obligated but undisbursed funds. An intervention presented as protection against waste was weakening the controls required to protect resources already committed. [8]
The consequences extended beyond the initial interruption. A GAO report published on September 30, 2026, recorded the termination of approximately 6,780 of 7,510 USAID awards between January 2025 and March 2026. The State Department had assumed responsibility for the remaining programs, but GAO found incomplete information about awards and staffing, together with inadequate documented guidance for decisions. These findings establish impaired public stewardship without identifying a corresponding private gain. Their relevance to extraction lies in the erosion of controls through which public resources are protected and their diversion can be detected. [9]
Information itself became a further point of vulnerability. In a January 16, 2026, court filing, the government disclosed that a DOGE employee at the Social Security Administration had signed a voter-data agreement with a political advocacy group outside the agency’s review procedures. The group sought evidence of voter fraud and the reversal of election results in certain states. The filing expressly stated that SSA had not found evidence that its data had been shared with that group. It separately disclosed DOGE personnel’s use of an unapproved external service to share data that the agency could not fully identify. This record documents failures of control and undisclosed political contacts; it does not establish that Musk personally ordered those activities. [10]
The distinction is consequential. Public custody of information entails limits on its use. A citizen’s submission of personal records for the administration of benefits does not confer a general entitlement to employ those records for partisan objectives. When access expands while the institution responsible for the records cannot fully account for their disposition, possession and accountability begin to separate. The threatened extraction consists in converting information held for a defined public purpose into a resource available to other interests.
Michael Lewis’s Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State approaches the administrative rupture through public servants whose work brought them into conflict with DOGE. The book’s subjects include officials concerned with the protection of taxpayer information and the observance of institutional rules. Its title preserves the designation applied to people regarded as impediments. [11] The designation exposes a political judgment: a limit on action can be represented as a defect in the person responsible for observing it. Once that substitution occurs, the removal of the official can appear to solve the problem without answering the objection.
Public service does not confer immunity from criticism, and professional continuity does not guarantee competence. The relevant distinction concerns the grounds on which an objection is examined. A requirement to protect records, document expenditure, or comply with an appropriation can be tested against evidence and law. The classification of the official as an obstacle changes the subject of examination. Institutional knowledge then loses authority precisely where it could disclose the costs or limits of the proposed action.
The new electoral financing gives this administrative history a continuing political significance. Reuters’s October 12 report noted that House Democrats had called for investigations into Musk’s federal contracts and his work at DOGE. Control of Congress therefore bears directly on the prospect of scrutiny. [1] The contributions establish the scale of his support; they do not establish a particular agreement to suppress an investigation. The structural concern is that the party benefiting from the money can acquire an electoral incentive to limit scrutiny of its benefactor, even without an explicit agreement.
The 2025 rupture demonstrates that the political alliance was contingent; the new donations restore electoral support without conferring public authority. In 2025, Musk’s access to the presidency accompanied his intervention in federal administration. In 2026, renewed financing may help preserve the congressional majority positioned to scrutinize that earlier intervention. The connection is between past administrative influence and the present conditions of accountability. Musk’s position combines the capacity to support that majority with a direct interest in the conduct it may examine.
Extraction becomes harder to detect and contest as the capacity for correction diminishes. Money lost through a particular decision may be counted. The loss of staff able to reconstruct that decision, records capable of identifying its beneficiaries, and procedures able to contest it can outlast the original transaction. Public institutions then become less capable of detecting the next injury. The persistence of audits, disclosure, and litigation demonstrates that correction remains possible; the failures those processes reveal establish the damage against which correction now operates.
Musk helped accelerate this development through his financial scale, his access to the presidency, and his participation in administrative dismantling. The government that enabled the intervention bears its own responsibility. The resulting constitutional danger lies in the increasing distance between public authority and effective public correction. Elections and statutes may remain in place while the institutions needed to give them practical force are depleted. A government can continue to act in the name of the people as the people’s capacity to hold its beneficiaries accountable recedes.
[6] United States Constitution, Article I, §§ 1 and 9, and Article II, § 3; transcription maintained by the National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcriptGovernment Accountability Office, B-337203, August 5, 2025, “Department of Health and Human Services—National Institutes of Health—Application of Impoundment Control Act to Availability of Funds for Grants.” The decision addresses impoundment and distinguishes that question from the separate litigation concerning particular grant terminations. https://www.gao.gov/products/b-337203
[7] Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, “Snapshot: The IRS’s Inflation Reduction Act Spending Through September 30, 2025,” report 2026-IE-R003, March 25, 2026. See the discussion of deferred resignations and the report’s account of CBO’s January 2026 estimate for the additional $11.7 billion rescission. The projected $38.6 billion revenue reduction covers 2026–2035; it is not an estimate of the effects of DOGE alone. https://www.tigta.gov/reports/inspection-evaluation/snapshot-the-irss-inflation-reduction-act-spending-through-september-30-2025/
[8] Reuters, “Musk says USAID to be shut down in government cost-cutting drive,” February 3, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-give-update-reform-effort-amid-questions-about-his-power-2025-02-03/USAID Office of Inspector General, “Oversight of USAID-Funded Humanitarian Assistance Programming Impacted by Staffing Reductions and Pause on Foreign Assistance,” February 10, 2025. The $8.2 billion figure identifies obligated but undisbursed funds exposed to the identified oversight risks; it is not a finding that those funds were lost or stolen. https://oig.usaid.gov/node/7439
[9] Government Accountability Office, “Foreign Assistance: Agencies Made Broad Changes, but State Lacked Guidance for Decisions,” GAO-26-108607, September 30, 2026. The termination count covers January 2025 through March 2026. The report records State’s assumption of the remaining USAID programs and distinguishes the termination of awards from the absence of reliable information about retained responsibilities. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-108607
[10] United States Department of Justice, “Notice of Corrections to the Record,” AFSCME et al. v. Social Security Administration et al., No. 1:25-cv-00596-ELH, document 197, January 16, 2026, §§ V–VI and footnote 1, pp. 4–6. The filing acknowledges the unapproved agreement and external data-sharing practices while expressly stating that SSA had not seen evidence of a transfer of SSA data to the advocacy group. These are dated disclosures in litigation, not a final judicial determination of every participant’s conduct. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.577321/gov.uscourts.mdd.577321.197.0.pdf
[11] Michael Lewis, Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, published October 6, 2026. The description of the book’s subjects follows the joint announcement from W. W. Norton and Pushkin Industries, June 4, 2026. The institutional interpretation developed in the essay is independent of that publisher’s description. https://www.pushkin.fm/news/norton-pushkin-publish-michael-lewis-blockers-rebels-in-the-deep-state
Silence III by Ricardo Morín 22″ × 30″ Watercolor, graphite, gesso, acrylic on paper 2010
I. The City of Glass and Silver
From the balcony the city offered itself to Astra as it offered itself to everyone who could afford the height: entire, luminous, composed, as if it had been arranged that afternoon for her inspection and would be put away again once she went in. The towers stood in their silver order. The avenues ran with light. At this hour, which was neither evening nor night but the long twilight the city had learned to keep, the skyline burned so steadily that the stars, she had once remarked at a dinner, seemed ashamed to show themselves; and the remark had been repeated, and admired, and printed under her name, so that it had long ago ceased to feel like something she had seen.
She had seen it, though. That was the peculiarity of the evening, if it was a peculiarity at all: she found herself seeing again what she had already said.
Below, the people moved through the streets with the ease of those who believe themselves looked after. She had known them for years only in this way, as a motion of light at a great distance, and she had known what they wanted because she had been paid, in one form or another, to tell them. Bitcoin had been the word for it. She had said the word in rooms like the one behind her and on screens that carried her face into rooms she would never enter, and she had said it well: freedom without permission, wealth without a master, the old hierarchies dissolved in a ledger that no one owned. She had believed it in the way one believes a part one performs nightly, which is to say with a conviction that never required her to look at it.
What was new, and she turned the observation over with something nearer to curiosity than to alarm, was not that the promise had grown thin. She had always known that a promise, sold widely enough, must thin. It was rather that she could now hear it thinning: a faint flatness beneath the melody, a note held a fraction too long, the kind of fault one notices first in a performance one has given oneself.
The air carried its usual perfume. It was expensive, and it was stale, and she had never before allowed the two words to stand together.
Nexys had built the city, or had let it be said so often that the difference no longer signified. His name was in the glass. Her own name, with its suggestion of stars, had pleased him for its sound; but it was her lineage he had wanted, she had always understood that, a family history of men who had governed by not being questioned. He had looked at her once, early, across a table, with the frank interest of a man appraising a foundation. She had admired the frankness. She had taken it for a kind of honesty, and perhaps it had been one.
She would not have said, had anyone asked her on the balcony, that anything had changed. Nobody asked. The wind moved her hair and she let it, because the long lenses in the opposite towers liked her hair moved by wind, and because she had long since stopped distinguishing between the things she did for them and the things she did.
Yet there were, in the streets she had only lately begun to look at directly, figures the light did not flatter: people sitting where no one sat, in the doorways of shops that sold nothing they could buy. There were the exchanges beneath the exchanges, where promises changed hands in place of work. She had known of them as one knows of weather in a distant province. She knew of them now as she knew the faces at her own receptions, and the comparison, which she had not invited, declined to leave.
What she noticed most, and noticed without wishing to, was the way she was looked at. For years the look of the crowd had been admiration, and she had worn it as she wore the city’s twilight, as a light that happened to fall on her. Lately it had altered. It was more patient than hostility: the look, as it seemed to her, that one gives a figure on a stage when one has begun to guess the ending.
She went in. The room was warm; the glass closed behind her without a sound; and the city remained exactly as composed as before, which she found, on reflection, that she had expected.
II. The Spectacle
The hall had been lit for him, as all the halls were. Light fell in measured quantities upon the marble and returned from it upon the faces, and the faces turned, as they had been arranged to turn, toward the doors.
Astra stood near the center and apart from it. She had mastered long ago the art of being at once the occasion’s ornament and its witness, and she practiced it now with the old ease and a new attention. She heard the voices rise and fall in their devotion. She felt the gaze of the room upon her and measured it, as she had always measured it, for the quality of its regard. It had once been bright. It had once asked nothing but to be allowed to admire. Tonight it asked something she could not at first name, and then, with a small inward start, could: it was waiting.
Not for her rise. That had happened.
Nexys arrived in the manner of a man who had rehearsed spontaneity: a pause at the threshold, a smile released by degrees, a hand lifted toward the cameras as though he had only that moment noticed them. The applause swelled to receive him. And then, across the room, his eyes found hers, and there passed between them something that no one else present could have seen.
It was not admiration, and it was not command. She could not have said what it was. It was gone before she could try.
He came to her through the crowd. “You look magnificent,” he said, and let his eyes stay a moment longer than the compliment required. “As always.”
“Is everything in order?”
“It will be perfect.” He glanced aside, not at anyone, merely aside. “It always is.”
Perfect. The word fell between them like a coin on glass and rang, she thought, a little false; and she was struck less by the falseness than by the fact that she had heard it. She had used the word herself a thousand times. She had never listened to it.
She moved on, and the crowd parted, and she let it. Speeches were made. She heard herself praised in a sentence she recognized as one she had written, months before, for another occasion. She smiled where smiling was expected. She was conscious through all of it of Nexys at her shoulder, and of a distance between them that he would not acknowledge and that she, she found, felt no wish to measure aloud.
Later she stood at the window where the noise thinned. The city below was indifferent to the hall, as cities are, its lights continuing without reference to anyone’s applause, and she thought how much of what she had called her world was held together by nothing firmer than an agreement to keep looking at it.
She heard his step and did not turn.
“Enjoying the performance?” There was mockery in it, and under the mockery something more brittle, as if the question had been meant to come out lighter than it did.
She took her time. “You always said this was your world.”
“It is.”
“Maybe it never was.”
He did not answer. She had known him to answer everything; she had known him to answer things not yet said; and now he stood beside her in a silence he had not chosen, and she watched him discover that he had nothing to put into it. He went back to the room. The applause went on behind her without interruption.
She did not feel, then, that she had won anything. She felt, rather, that she had said something before she knew she believed it, and that the saying had informed her that she did.
III. The Office
The message came in the morning, among the others that had gathered on her screen in the night like callers who had not been told she was out. Meet me at the office. We need to discuss the next steps. There was no charm in it. She had received a great many messages from Nexys and had read in each the small ornaments with which he dressed an order, and she noticed their absence as one notices a room from which a familiar piece of furniture has been removed.
The office was his in every line: dark wood, cold metal, angles that admitted no doubt. He sat behind the desk with a screen lighting his face from below, and his fingers moved on the polished surface in a rhythm he did not seem to hear. He did not rise. He indicated the chair.
“Sit.”
She sat. She had learned long ago that words were instruments, and that the most effective of them were the ones kept back; she had learned it, she reflected with a detachment that surprised her, chiefly from him.
“You saw it,” he said. “Last night. The way they looked.”
“Yes.”
“The way they’ve turned.”
She did not correct the word. It was not quite the word, but it was near enough, and she was interested to find that he had felt it too: that the look she had supposed was hers alone to notice had been noticed from the other side.
He pushed a folder across the desk. Inside were plans, measures, the language of order: the murmur would be met before it rose, the doubt answered before it spread. She turned the pages and saw that they were good, as his plans were always good, and that they were addressed to a crowd that no longer existed in the form for which they had been drawn.
“They won’t work,” she said.
He brought the flat of his hand down on the desk, and the sound went round the room and came back. “You think you understand this better than I do? I made them believe. I made all of it. And you,” and there he stopped.
She watched him stop. She watched the thought arrive in him, and saw that it had come to him from her face and not from anything she had done; and she understood, a moment after he did, what he had seen there.
“You’re not in this anymore,” he said slowly. “Are you?”
It would have been easy to deny. She had denied larger things in that chair. What surprised her was that the answer that came to her was neither denial nor confession but simply the truest sentence available, and that she had not composed it.
“I don’t think I ever was,” she said. “Not in the way you meant.”
She rose. He said something behind her, and then something louder, and she heard the words without following them, as one hears rain against a window in a room where one is reading. The elevator received her. The doors met with their soft sound, and in their polished steel she saw her own face, composed, admirable, exactly as it had always been; and it occurred to her, descending, that she had never yet looked at it as a stranger would.
IV. The Café
She did not go home. She could not have said where she meant to go; it was only that the elevator had delivered her to the street rather than to the car that waited beneath the building, and that she had let it.
The city she walked into was not the one she had looked at from the balcony. It was the same city, she reminded herself, and the reminder did not help. From above, the streets had been a motion of light; at their own level they were narrow, and wet, and full of people who were not moving at all. The towers, seen from beneath, were not silver but grey, and their glass gave back not the sky but the street, so that wherever she looked she saw the doorways and the debris and, now and then, a woman in a good coat walking among them who was herself.
Nobody looked at her. She had been looked at for so long that she could not at first identify the sensation, and when she did she found that it was not relief.
Her screen lit in her pocket twice. The first message was his, and she did not open it; whatever he had written would be addressed to the woman who had sat across his desk that morning, and she did not yet know whether that woman was the one now walking. The second came from a number she did not know. It named a corner and nothing else, and because she had nowhere she meant to go, she went.
The café stood at a corner where two streets met at an angle the city’s planners had evidently not intended. It was dim, and it smelled of old coffee and older smoke, and it had the air, which she recognized from certain rooms of her childhood, of a place in which time was permitted to stand still. A neon sign in the window made a pale stain on the table nearest it, and at that table, with her back to the door, sat a woman Astra knew.
She knew her in the way one knows the furniture of an institution. The woman had stood for years at the edge of Nexys’s occasions, never at the center, always nearby: a face that applauded at the proper moments, that held doors, that wrote down what was said. Astra had never learned her name. It came to her, standing in the doorway, that she had never needed to, and the thought was not comfortable.
“You’re late,” the woman said, without turning.
Astra sat down across from her. It did not occur to her until she had done so that she had not been invited, or rather that she had been invited in a manner so assured that the invitation had preceded her decision to come in.
“I wasn’t aware we had an appointment.”
“No,” the woman agreed. “You wouldn’t have been.” She looked at Astra with an interest that was frank without being friendly, the interest of someone confirming a description. “I thought you might run. People do, at about this point. They go abroad for a while, and come back, and find that nothing they left has changed, and are grateful.”
“What point is this?”
The woman considered the question as if it had been a real one. “The point at which you begin to see the room you’ve been standing in.”
Astra said nothing. She had been taught, and had taught others, that silence in a negotiation belongs to whoever can bear it longer; but she was conscious that this was not a negotiation, or not one whose terms she understood, and that her silence was less a tactic than a want of anything to say.
“You think you’re the first,” the woman went on, more gently. “Everyone who wakes up thinks so. It’s the one vanity we’re all allowed.” She turned her cup a quarter turn on its saucer. “I watched you sell it, you know. Year after year. I used to think you were the only one in those rooms who believed it.”
“And now?”
“Now I think you were the only one who needed to.”
It was said without malice, and it was the absence of malice that made it difficult to receive. Astra looked at the woman’s hands, which were not young, and at the cuff of her coat, which had been mended with care, and she heard in what she was being told something she could not at once dismiss: that the belief had been for her and not for them; that the crowd might have been content with the performance, and only the performer had required it to be true.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you’ll want to do something,” the woman said. “People do, at this point. And I would rather you did it knowing what you are.”
“And what am I?”
The woman almost smiled. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
She reached into her coat and laid a small object on the table between them: a device, dark, smooth, without markings, no larger than a cigarette case. She did not push it toward Astra. She left it exactly in the middle, where it belonged to neither of them.
“There are others,” she said. “Not many. Not the ones you would expect. When you use that, they’ll know you’re ready. What they do then is not up to me, and it won’t be up to you.”
“And you?”
“I’m too far in.” She said it plainly, as one names a distance. “I’ve stood beside him for eleven years. You can’t stand anywhere that long and pretend the ground isn’t yours.”
Astra heard the sentence, and heard beneath it that it was addressed to her as much as spoken of its speaker; and she did not, for the moment, let herself follow where it led.
She looked at the device. It was a small thing, and she was aware of wanting it to be larger: to be, in some visible way, equal to the occasion. It was not. It sat on the table in the stain of the neon as the woman’s cup sat, or the sugar bowl, and the fact that it was an object among objects seemed to her, obscurely, the most serious thing about it.
She took it. It was colder than she had expected, and lighter.
“I’m ready,” she said, and heard as she said it that the words had come out in the voice she used on screens.
The woman heard it too. Astra saw her hear it. Something passed across her face that was not disappointment, since disappointment would have required expectation, but was perhaps its more patient relative.
“Then go,” the woman said. “You’re not alone in this. That’s the good news.” She lifted her cup. “It’s also the other kind.”
Outside, the rain had begun, and the neon lay broken on the wet pavement in pieces that did not quite fit together. Astra stood under the awning with the device in her pocket beside the screen she had not answered, two small weights of nearly the same size, and it occurred to her that she could not, without taking them out, have said with certainty which was which.
V. The Gathering
She pressed it that night, alone, in the apartment that looked across at Nexys’s tower, and nothing happened. She had not known what she expected: a light, a sound, some acknowledgment proportionate to the step. The device lay in her palm exactly as before. It was only after she had set it down on the glass of the table, and gone to the window, and come back, that she found on her screen a message from the number that had named the corner, consisting of an address and an hour and nothing else.
What struck her, reading it, was not its brevity but its tone, which was one she knew. It was the tone of a summons that does not trouble to persuade, and she had last heard it that morning.
The address was in the old financial district: an unmarked building between a shuttered bank and a shop that repaired watches. She was admitted by a young man who did not ask her name. He led her down a corridor and into a long room where a dozen people sat at a table under lamps that had been placed, she noticed at once, so as to leave the head of the table in shadow.
She noticed it because she had placed such lamps herself.
Everyone looked up. She had been looked at in many rooms, and she knew the varieties; this was not admiration, nor the patient waiting of the gala, but assessment of a plainer kind, the look given to a delivery to see whether it has arrived intact. She bore it. She found that she was measuring the room as it measured her, and that the measurement came to her with a disagreeable ease, as if her eyes had been trained for precisely this.
The man at the head of the table rose. He was tall and broad, his face mostly in the shadow the lamps had been arranged to keep. “We’ve been waiting for you,” he said.
Twice in one day she had been told she was expected. She wondered whether there remained a room in the city she could enter as a surprise.
“You understand what’s at stake.” It was not a question, and she did not treat it as one.
She sat where he indicated, and he spoke. He spoke well, and at length, of fear: that the system ran on it, that power accumulated required more of it to keep, that fear could carry only so much before it gave way, and that when it gave way everything would come down with it. The room listened as rooms listen to a voice they have heard before. Astra listened too, and was aware, about halfway through, of the pleasure of hearing a speech well made, the professional pleasure, and then of where she had learned to feel it.
He paused where Nexys paused. He lowered his voice where Nexys lowered his. It was not imitation; she was almost sure he had never heard Nexys speak except as everyone had, on screens. It was simply that there were, it appeared, only so many ways of holding a room, and he had found the same one.
A woman beside her leaned close. “You think you’re ready for this?” she whispered, though not softly enough, so that it was a whisper meant to be overheard; and Astra recognized that too.
“I don’t think anyone is,” she said, to the table, and saw several of them approve the answer, and was dismayed to find that she had chosen it because she knew they would.
“What do we do now?” someone asked, and the man at the head of the table smiled.
“Now we wait. The moment will show itself.”
She thought that she had heard Nexys say very nearly that, years ago, before the city’s first great launch, and that it had been true then because he had arranged the moment in advance.
The door opened. A man came in late, took the chair opposite hers without apology, and sat for some time regarding the company with an expression she could not read: not contempt, not interest, but something like the attention of a physician at a bedside where the case is already known. At last his eyes came to her.
“You don’t know what you’re getting into,” he said.
“I’m not afraid.”
“No,” he said. “You will be.” And then, after a moment, more quietly, as if correcting a phrase: “Of what you’ll see.”
She took it for a threat, as everyone at the table seemed to take it. The room drew together; the man at its head said something sharp; the meeting went on.
When she left it was nearly morning. The street was empty. She looked back at the building, which had no sign, and at the bank beside it, whose sign had been taken down, and at the watchmaker’s, whose window was full of clocks that did not agree, and she understood, without wishing to, that she had spent the night in a room built on the same plan as the one she had left: only smaller, and darker, and lit by someone who had studied the same light.
VI. The Signal
The next message came four days later and said only: It’s time.
She had spent the four days as she had spent years: at a luncheon, at a fitting, at a screening where she was photographed beside a minister whose name she could not afterward recall. She had answered none of Nexys’s messages. She had noticed that they stopped on the second day, and she had not been able to decide which she found harder to bear, the messages or their absence.
The room this time was not the long room but one beneath it, where the lamps had been replaced by screens, and where the people from the table sat each before a screen of their own, so that the light on their faces came from below, as it had come on Nexys’s at his desk. She saw that and let it go. She was learning to let a great deal go, and was not sure the learning did her credit.
The man from the head of the table held out his hand, and she understood what for. She took the device from her pocket. She had carried it for four days, and her hand had grown used to it, and she was surprised by a reluctance to surrender it that had nothing to do with its purpose.
He set it on the table and asked for her hand. The device woke to her thumb and to no one else’s, and she saw that whatever was in it had been drawn from places where her name was the key: archives she could open because she had stood beside Nexys, and which no one at that table could have reached without her. He connected it to something, and the screens changed.
She had never been told what was in it, and she did not ask now, because she saw. Columns, names, dates, the accounts behind the accounts: the record of who had bought before the words she spoke and who had sold after them, and of how a market said to belong to no one had been steered, from beneath, by very few hands. Her own name was there. Not as a buyer. As a date: each of her appearances set down beside the movement that followed it, with the regularity of a tide table.
She had known. Not every figure, not the arithmetic, but the shape; she had known the shape as one knows the shape of a room in the dark, and she had never turned on the light because she had never needed to cross it.
“Now,” the man said, and someone pressed a key, and the records went out: not to any authority, nor to the press, but onto the exchanges’ own feeds, where those who traded would read them in the same columns as the price.
Nothing happened in the room. It was the second time in a week that a thing she had done produced nothing she could see, and she was beginning to understand that this was how such things happened. The screens went on showing their columns. Then, one by one, they began to show other things: the price, falling; then the exchanges, where the numbers moved too fast to be read; then, after an hour, the streets.
She watched the streets. She watched people gather at the windows of the exchanges beneath the exchanges, the ones she had known of as weather in a distant province, and she watched them stand there with the patience she had seen at the gala, which she had taken for the patience of people waiting for an ending they had guessed. Some of them were holding screens. On some of those screens, small and bright, was her own face, from an old appearance, saying the word.
Across the room, the man who had come late was not watching the screens. He was watching her.
She felt it as one feels a draft, and turned, and met his look, and he did not look away. There was nothing in his face she could have called triumph, or pity. It was the physician’s attention again: the case was proceeding as expected, and he was interested in the patient’s eyes.
Of what you’ll see. She heard it as though he had said it a second time, and heard in it only the threat.
Toward evening a fire was reported in the district of the old markets, and then another; the screens showed them small and orange and silent. The lights in the room faltered once, as lights do when a city draws more than it was built to give, and in that instant every screen went dark, each a pane of black glass, and in each of them she saw the room: the bent heads, the man at the head of the table, herself among them. Then the light returned, and the numbers with it, and she could not have said whether the face she had seen in the nearest screen had looked like hers.
They stayed through the night. Toward morning most of the others had gone, slipping out by twos, and she found herself alone in the room with the man from the head of the table. He sat before the screens with his hands flat on the table.
“It’s going faster than we planned,” he said.
“Did you plan it?”
He took her meaning, or a meaning, and answered it. “We planned to hold it when it fell.” He said it without emphasis, as a man states the next item on an agenda. “Someone has to. If we don’t, he will, or someone like him. That was always the point.”
She waited, and he heard what he had said in her waiting.
“You think that makes us the same,” he said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“No.” He looked back at the screens. “You don’t need to, do you? You never did. It’s what made you so good at it.”
She did not answer. She was thinking, with a calm she did not trust, that he was right, and that what he had named was not her silence but what her silence had always been for: it let others finish the sentence, and own it, while she kept the face of someone who had never spoken it.
Through the one high window the sky was going grey over the old markets, where the smoke stood straight up in the windless air, and she thought, without any particular feeling, that it was the first time in years she had seen the city at an hour when it was not lit for anyone.
VII. The Mediator
Within a week the city had begun to describe what had happened, and the description was not the event.
She followed it on the screens, as everyone did. The fall was called, in the commentary, a correction; the record, a disclosure; the fires, regrettable. A commission was named. Its members were persons she had sat beside at dinners. By the ninth day the price had recovered a third of what it had lost, and the voices that announced this did so in a tone she knew to the syllable, because she had trained it into half of them: the tone of calm restored, which is always a little warmer than the calm it replaces.
Nexys did not appear. His absence was explained, and then explained again, and the explanations did not agree, and nobody seemed to mind.
The summons, when it came, came from the man at the head of the table, and it named not the building by the watchmaker’s but a hotel she knew, a quiet one, used for arrangements that were not to be seen being arranged.
He was there, in a sitting room on a high floor, and he was not alone. Across from him sat a man she had never seen, whose clothes were too good for the room and whose watch had the dull gleam of things that need not shine. He rose when she came in, which the other did not, and she registered the courtesy as one registers a signature.
“A mediator,” he said, before anyone could introduce him, and smiled as if the word were a small joke between them that she would come in time to enjoy. “We seem to have interests in common.”
She sat. She looked at the man from the head of the table, and he looked at the carpet, and she understood the shape of the meeting before a word of it was spoken, as she had understood the shape of the ledger.
The mediator spoke well too. Everyone, it seemed to her lately, spoke well. He spoke of the disorder of the past week as a thing that had served its purpose, and of a transition, orderly and managed, that would preserve what was valuable and correct what had been, he allowed, excessive. He did not mention Nexys. He did not need to; Nexys was in the room as a vacancy is in a room, shaping the furniture around it.
“And if we refuse,” she said.
He tilted his head, with what looked like real interest. “You misunderstand me. I’m not offering anything. I’m describing what has already happened, so that you can decide how you would like to be standing when it’s announced.”
He drew a folded paper from his jacket and laid it on the low table, and she thought of the device on the café table, set exactly between two people so as to belong to neither. This one he pushed, gently, toward her.
It was a statement. It was to be read by her, on the evening the commission reported, and it explained that she had helped to bring the truth to light because she had always believed in the promise and could not bear to see it betrayed; that the promise was larger than any one man; that it would now, at last, be kept.
She read it twice. It was very good. It was better than she would have written it. It had her rhythms, the slight delay before a key word, the way she let a sentence end on something softer than the listener expected; and it had, in the third paragraph, a phrase she had used once, years before, at a dinner, about the stars, slightly altered, so that it now seemed to be about the city’s future.
She looked up and found the mediator watching her with pleasure, the pleasure of a craftsman whose work is being examined by the only person able to appreciate it.
“Who wrote this?”
“Does it matter? It’s yours.” He opened his hands. “If you would rather not read it, there’s a great deal of footage. You’ve said most of it before.”
She heard, then, what she was being told. Her voice was not hers. It had been studied, and learned, and could be spoken without her; she had made it to be repeated, and it had been.
“You won,” the mediator said, kindly. “You simply haven’t recognized what winning looks like.”
She looked at the man from the head of the table. He met her eyes now, and she saw in his face not shame but relief, the relief of a man who has been offered better terms than he feared, and who would, she understood, sit on the commission.
“It’s finished, Astra,” he said.
She stood. Nobody stopped her. The mediator rose again, with the same courtesy, and did not take back the paper; he left it on the table, where it remained between the two men, folded, as she went out.
In the corridor there was a long mirror, of the kind hotels hang to make their corridors seem wider than they are, and she passed it without looking, and was aware of having done so.
VIII. The Vendor
It had rained while she was inside, and stopped, and the street before the hotel lay polished under its lamps. She did not take a car. She walked, as she had walked on the morning she left Nexys’s office, and the city let her, as it had then; but it was a different letting. Then it had not noticed her. Now, she thought, it had noticed, and had concluded that it need not.
The screens in the windows of the closed shops showed the chairman of the commission, then the recovered price, then, for a moment, her own face, from an old appearance, with the sound turned off. She watched her mouth shape a word she could no longer hear, and walked on before it finished.
At a corner near the old markets, where the smell of smoke still hung in the wet air, a man was cooking meat on a grill beneath a sheet of plastic strung between two posts. He was old, and he had the face of someone who had seen a good many things begin and had not been surprised when they ended. He turned the skewers without looking at them.
“Late to be walking,” he said.
She stopped. She thought of saying something. There were sentences available to her; there were always sentences. She could have asked him what one does when one learns that the fight was never one’s own; she could have made the question sound as though she had only just thought of it. She found that each of them, before it reached her lips, had the slight delay before its key word and the soft ending, and she let them go.
He held out a skewer. She had not asked for it. She took it, and its heat in the cold air startled her, and she ate standing, as she had not eaten in years.
He watched her eat. He did not watch as the crowd had watched, nor as the late man had watched, with the physician’s interest; he watched as a man watches a customer, to see whether the food is good. It came to her, slowly, that he did not know who she was. The screens behind him faced the street, and her face had passed across them twice while she stood there, and he had not once looked round.
“You look like someone deciding something,” he said.
She considered it. She could not have said what she was deciding; she was not sure she was deciding anything, or that there remained anything her deciding would touch. “Do I?”
“I’ve seen it.” He shrugged. “People stop here at this hour, they’ve got that look. Mostly they eat and go home.”
“And the others?”
“The others eat and go somewhere else.” He turned the meat. “You can’t tell which from the outside.”
She took out her screen. The messages from Nexys were there, unopened, from the first two days, and she opened the last of them. It said: Come back. Nothing has changed. She read it twice, and heard in it not his voice but the voice of the woman in the café, saying that people go abroad for a while, and come back, and find that nothing they left has changed, and are grateful. She put the screen away without answering, and was conscious that this, too, was not an answer.
She paid him. He took the money and gave her change with the same neutral attention, and when she thanked him he nodded as he would have nodded to anyone. She stood a moment longer than she needed to under the edge of his plastic sheet, because she was aware of something she did not wish to lose: the sensation of having been seen by someone who had no idea what he was looking at. She found that she wanted, more than she had wanted anything in a long time, to know what he had seen.
The grill hissed. The screens behind him changed to the weather. She went on, not toward the towers and not away from them, and the street received her as it would have received anyone.
Ricardo F. Morín What Is Good Sense? Computer-generated image (CGI) 2026
Common sense consists of conclusions reached well before the occasion that calls for them: held in reserve, transmitted without examination, and applied whenever a new occasion resembles one already known. Its convenience is not imaginary, since it spares the effort of looking. And so it is that men and women of every condition carry it nonchalantly, and with it views of a purely stereotypical nature, accepted as norms of conduct because no one recalls having examined them. Under its influence, people meet one another already sorted: each is received as an instance of a collective phenomenon, a mirrored image of others presumed alike, and each answers from within a place assigned in advance. What takes place between them is less an encounter than an exchange between categories, in which the category arrives before the person and occupies the place where the person would have appeared.
The comparison of civilizations offers its most familiar form. Between any Latin and any Anglo-Saxon culture, common sense draws a border and declares two isolated worlds: Italians are like that, the English otherwise. The human condition is thereby redistributed into collective classifications dependent upon physical aspect or historical attainment. Words such as Hellenized, Latinized, Anglicized, Africanized, or Indigenized describe the passage of language and custom across centuries. Applied to an individual, they may say something true of speech or formation, yet they claim nothing about who that individual is: the claim begins when a description of many is carried over to a single person and settles in advance what that person will be found to be. What results is a sectarianism, banal and insular, which mistakes the boundary for what it encloses.
What the category erases is the particular: this face, this voice, this circumstance, which resemble others in part and never in whole. It is there that good sense begins, as a form of perception before it is a form of judgment. A painter knows the difference between drawing what is seen and drawing what is known: the eye registers the actual geometry of a face, its asymmetries and its accidents, while the hand reaches for the generic face it has drawn a hundred times. Yet the eye that registers those accidents has itself been formed by the hundred faces before it: what it retains sharpens its seeing, provided that each new face is allowed to correct what was retained. The generic face belongs to common sense, whereas the actual face is available only to attention.
What is retained from one encounter may serve the next or may stand in its place. The difference lies in whether the earlier conclusion remains open to correction by the person now present, or is applied as though that person had already been seen. Whereas common sense is held as a possession, good sense is exercised as an act, performed on each occasion or not performed at all: no one has it as one has a temperament or an education, and its absence leaves no trace, since common sense supplies an answer in the place where looking would have been.
Consequently, the line between the two does not run between groups of people: it separates neither the learned from the unlettered nor the critic from the crowd, but crosses each person from one moment to the next. A woman at a market stall who lets the stranger’s fatigue, rather than his accent, govern how she answers him has looked. The same woman, describing his country to her neighbors an hour later, may draw on the reserve. Nor are those who denounce classification exempt, since the crowd they denounce is itself a category, drawn from the same reserve as the stereotypes they oppose.
Good sense does not exempt its own conclusions. A clear perception, once kept beyond the reach of examination, hardens into a rule, and the rule passes into the reserve from which the next stereotypes are drawn: what was seen yesterday is applied tomorrow to someone who was never seen at all.
Ricardo F. Morín Breaking Away Computer-generated image (CGI) 2026
Laws are written in the language of peace, but peace does not follow from them alone. A statute specifies the conduct it requires: it forbids violence, protects the vulnerable, and assigns duties to those who govern. Sanctions can restrain conduct where ethical conviction is absent, and the law can give the injured a means of redress. Yet the application of the law depends on people who obey, evade, or manipulate it. Where its administration serves the interests it was meant to restrain, the distance between what is written and what is done widens.
The same distance appears among nations. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted in 1948, and genocide has been committed since. Slavery and forced labor are prohibited under international law, yet both persist throughout the world. In the United Nations Security Council, the five permanent members hold veto power, which has been used to block draft resolutions concerning mass atrocities. The institution’s procedures follow their regular course: sessions are held, reports are submitted, and resolutions are numbered. What those procedures were established to prevent continues alongside them. Where economic or strategic interests prevail, the obligation to act yields, and that capitulation is recorded in the same orderly form as everything else.
Political doctrines can conceal this distance and justify arrangements that cause harm. A democracy proclaims the equality of its citizens and tolerates their exclusion. Capitalism invokes the promise of reward for effort as its justification, while ownership confers advantages that effort alone cannot secure. Communism promises the abolition of classes and installs a class that administers the rest of society. Fascism promises national unity and greatness; submission to its rulers is demanded as proof of loyalty to the nation. The doctrines differ, as does the worth of what they profess. A promise may be betrayed, or it may make subordination acceptable. Left, center, and right accuse one another and seldom examine the loyalties that govern their own judgment. When accusation replaces examination, political debate is caught in a vortex of accusation and counteraccusation: the exchange continues, but the loyalties governing judgment remain fixed.
Silence in the face of injustice has different sources. A person worn down by the demands of survival may recognize injustice yet lack the strength or means to oppose it. A person with the means to act may be so absorbed in entertainment that unease at injustice is dulled before it gives rise to judgment. Exhaustion and indifference can produce the same public silence, though they entail different responsibilities. Those who benefit from that silence have no need to distinguish its causes.
Meanwhile, common goods pass into private hands, and some cell lines developed from human tissue are patented and sold. A patent does not establish that the person whose tissue made the research possible understood or consented to the commercial use of that material. Where consent is bypassed, appropriation extends to the substance of the body itself. Here, the law both limits conduct and assigns control. Compliance with a rule does not establish the ethical legitimacy of what it authorizes.
Each person acquires attachments before the capacity to judge them has developed: a nation, a region, a sect, a sacred text, a party, the loyalties an institution cultivates through its propaganda. These attachments give a person a place to stand and others to stand with. When loyalty overrides judgment, belonging to the group serves as a measure of another person’s worth. The outsider then appears as a rival, an inferior, or someone whose fate is of no concern. The sense of superiority that follows does not feel like an affront to another person’s humanity. It feels like belonging. Reformers and leaders may remain bound by the same loyalties as those they lead, and exploitation persists when fidelity to an institution excuses its conduct.
The division within the person and the division among nations are connected through the institutions people sustain. The fear a person carries into a negotiation, the greed that weighs a contract against a life, the envy that measures one nation by another’s wealth: these enter public life through decisions, contracts, and policies. An institution can restrain these dispositions or give them enduring force. Its rules can preserve an advantage beyond the lifetimes of those who secured it. The power to sustain or alter those rules is unevenly distributed, and responsibility varies accordingly. The impasse sustained by this vortex of political accusation recurs in the person whose judgment remains bound by loyalty.
To recognize this correspondence is to lose the assurance that the disorder belongs entirely elsewhere. Recognition offers no guarantee of repair. It locates the division in both the institution and the person and reveals how each sustains that division in the other. The deadlock in the Council is present in you, and yours is present there.
We do not cease to be selfish by denying our selfishness, nor do we cease to be violent by pretending that we are not. The contradiction between what we are and what we admit to being persists even when we evade it.
Awareness without selection brings its own illumination. Perceiving that clarity is like touching the tail of a comet.
The distance that separates us from ourselves enters into our contemplation of the distance that separates us from the stars. This inner distance obscures our perception of the world and conditions the meaning of our relationship with it.
“Geometric Allegory” digital painting (2023) by Ricardo Morin (American visual artist, born in Venezuela, 1954)
*
Scope and Use
This entry forms part of the constitutional corpus presented in the Appendix, comprising the twenty-five constitutions of Venezuela and organized for consultation rather than sequential reading. Comparison proceeds by means of permanent rubric codes whose identities remain constant across the corpus; absent rubrics signify constitutional silence, while retired rubrics are not reassigned. Citations are anchored first on the article number and follow the CIDEP recension linked at the close of the entry. The full corpus definition, methodology, and citation convention are set forth in the Scope and Use note heading the 19th-Century Constitutions, which opens in the installment of “Unmasking Disappointment: Series XI”.
Ricardo F. Morín October 12, 2026 Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania
19) The Constitution of 1931
The 1931 Constitución de los Estados Unidos de Venezuela [Constitution of the United States of Venezuela] was declared sanctioned by the congressional agreement dated 7 July 1931 at the Palacio Federal Legislativo [Federal Legislative Palace], Caracas. The constitutional closing bears the same date; the execution order at the Palacio Federal [Federal Palace], Caracas, bears 9 July 1931 and the signature of Pedro Itriago Chacín, identifying Acting President Pedro Itriago Chacín. (CIDEP 1931, pp. 3, 23–24, agreement, closing and execution formulas).
(modern Latinate English translation by the author from the CIDEP recension)
“The Congreso de los Estados Unidos de Venezuela [Congress of the United States of Venezuela], in the name of Almighty God, and in exercise of the authority conferred upon it by Article 126 of the Federal Pact in force, decrees the present Constitution.”
(CIDEP 1931, p. 3, preamble).
FND-TER—Territory
The Nación venezolana [Venezuelan Nation] consists of all Venezuelans under a political pact named Estados Unidos de Venezuela [United States of Venezuela] and is permanently and irrevocably independent of foreign domination or protection. Its territory is that of the Capitanía General de Venezuela [Captaincy General of Venezuela] before the political transformation of 1810, with treaty modifications; it cannot be ceded, transferred, leased, or otherwise alienated to a foreign power, even temporarily. (Arts. 1–2; cont., 1929, Arts. 1–2).
National territory comprises the Estados [States], Distrito Federal [Federal District], Territorios Federales [Federal Territories], and Dependencias Federales [Federal Dependencies]. The twenty Estados [States] are Anzoátegui, Apure, Aragua, Bolívar, Carabobo, Cojedes, Falcón, Guárico, Lara, Mérida, Miranda, Monagas, Nueva Esparta, Portuguesa, Sucre, Táchira, Trujillo, Yaracuy, Zamora, and Zulia. (Arts. 3–4; cont., 1929, Arts. 3–4).
State boundaries derive from those assigned to the former provinces by the Law of 28 April 1856, subject to the creation of federal entities, the constitutional date printed as 5 July 1909, and the 1917 Aragua–Carabobo agreement. Neighbouring Estados [States] may alter their common boundary by agreements approved by their legislatures, with reciprocal compensation or territorial cession. (Art. 5; cf. 1929, Art. 5: “the National Constitution of 5 August 1909”).
A special law organizes the Distrito Federal [Federal District], comprising Libertador and Vargas. The text places Caracas and El Recreo, El Valle, La Vega, Antímano, Macarao, and Macuto in Libertador. The law determines municipal powers so that federal political action is not obstructed. (Art. 6; cf. 1929, Art. 6: “El Recreo, El Valle, La Vega, Antímano, Maracao and Macuto”).
Caracas is the capital and seat of federal government, subject to the temporary relocation and official-visit provisions numbered 25(b) and 26 of Art. 100. (Arts. 7, 100(25)(b), 100(26); cont., 1929, Arts. 7, 100(23)(b), 100(24)).
Amazonas and Delta Amacuro are Territorios Federales [Federal Territories] governed by special laws. Changes to their boundaries, or those of the Distrito Federal [Federal District], with neighbouring Estados [States] require agreements between the federal and state executives approved by the Congreso [Congress] and the respective Asambleas Legislativas [Legislative Assemblies]. (Art. 8; cont., 1929, Art. 8).
A Territorio Federal [Federal Territory] may become a State if it has the population required for one deputy and demonstrates to the Congreso [Congress] its capacity to maintain and finance every branch of public service. Venezuelan Caribbean islands other than Margarita and Coche, which constitute Nueva Esparta, are Dependencias Federales [Federal Dependencies] directly governed by the Ejecutivo Federal [federal executive] until elevated by law to Territorios Federales [Federal Territories]. (Arts. 9–10; cont., 1929, Arts. 9–10).
The Corte Federal y de Casación [Federal and Cassation Court] decides boundary disputes between Estados [States] and those involving the Distrito Federal [Federal District] or Territorios Federales [Federal Territories], according to statutory procedure. (Arts. 11, 120(16); cont., 1929, Arts. 11, 120(16)).
POW-LEG—Congress
The Congreso de los Estados Unidos de Venezuela [Congress of the United States of Venezuela] exercises legislative power through the Cámara de Diputados [Chamber of Deputies] and Cámara del Senado [Senate]. Diputados [Deputies] and senators serve three years. (Art. 55; cont., 1929, Art. 55).
Each State elects deputies directly under its electoral law: one for every 35,000 inhabitants and one more for an excess of 15,000; a State below the base elects one. An equal number of Suplentes [Alternates] fills vacancies in election order. A deputy must be Venezuelan by birth and have completed twenty-one years. The Distrito Federal [Federal District] and qualifying Territorios Federales [Federal Territories] also elect deputies directly; indígenas no reducidos [unreduced Indigenous people] are excluded from the population base. (Arts. 56–58; cont., 1929, Arts. 56–58).
The Cámara de Diputados [Chamber of Deputies] may censure ministers whose acts warrant it in the Chamber’s judgment; the Presidente de la República [president] need not remove them unless the Corte Federal y de Casación [Federal and Cassation Court] declares legal grounds for trial. The law may assign further powers. (Art. 59; cont., 1929, Art. 59).
Each state Asamblea Legislativa [Legislative Assembly] elects two principal senators and two alternates from outside its membership. Alternates fill vacancies in election order. Senadores [Senators] must be Venezuelan by birth and over thirty. (Arts. 60–61; cont., 1929, Arts. 60–61).
The Cámara del Senado [Senate] may authorize burial in the Panteón Nacional [National Pantheon] for illustrious Venezuelans twenty-five years after death; consent to national officials accepting foreign gifts, offices, honours, or rewards; and consent to military promotions from Coronel [Colonel] and naval promotions from Capitán de Navío [Naval Captain], inclusive. (Art. 62(1–3); cont., 1929, Art. 62(1–3)).
The Cámara del Senado [Senate] also exercises the powers assigned to it by law. (Art. 62(4); new; 1929, Art. 62: no corresponding provision).
The Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] meet annually in the capital on 19 April or the nearest possible day, without prior convocation, for ninety days without extension. Every day and hour is available within that period. Extraordinary sessions are confined to the subjects in the executive convocation and connected legislation requiring amendment. (Art. 63; cont., 1929, Art. 63).
Two-thirds of the membership opens each Chamber; without that number, those present form a Comisión Preparatoria [Preparatory Commission] to secure attendance. Subsequent sessions require an absolute majority. Sessions are public unless the Chamber resolves otherwise. (Arts. 64–65; cont., 1929, Arts. 64–65).
Each Chamber regulates its procedure and debates, maintains order in its building, disciplines disorder, removes impediments to its functions, executes its exclusive resolutions, qualifies its members, and hears their resignations. Both Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] sit in the same town and open and close together; suspension or relocation requires the other’s consent, with disagreement resolved in joint session. (Arts. 66–67; cont., 1929, Arts. 66–67).
Public employment is incompatible with legislative membership during sessions. Remuneration is fixed by law and cannot be increased before the following term. (Arts. 68–69; cont., 1929, Arts. 68–69).
Legislative inmunidad [immunity] lasts from thirty days before 19 April until thirty days after sessions end. Members cannot be imprisoned, arrested, confined, detained, or obstructed in their functions, even for offences committed during that interval. Where a charge carries a penalty restricting personal liberty, the sumario [preliminary criminal investigation] is stayed while investigative steps proceed; the ordinary limit on its duration does not apply. The protected period is excluded from judicial time limits, and the Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] cannot waive members’ immunity. (Art. 70; cont., 1929, Art. 70).
Art. 70(2) also exempts members from answering claims and prints the phrase “resolver juramentos ni posiciones”. (Art. 70(2); cf. 1929, Art. 70(2): “take an oath or answer judicial interrogatories”).
Members are not responsible for opinions expressed in their Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] and cannot contract with the Ejecutivo Federal [federal executive] on their own or another’s behalf or pursue another person’s claims before it. (Arts. 71–72; cont., 1929, Arts. 71–72).
The Asamblea Legislativa [state legislature] fills senatorial vacancies for the remainder of the term when death or another permanent vacancy exhausts or reduces the list described as the list of senators. State constitutions and the Organic Law of the Distrito Federal [Federal District] govern vacancies in the Cámara de Diputados [Chamber of Deputies]. (Art. 73; cf. 1929, Art. 73: “the list of the alternates of senators for a State”).
The Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] meet jointly when the Constitution or laws require it, or upon an invitation accepted by the other Chamber. Their co-legislative acts are Leyes [Laws]; joint acts and acts within a Chamber’s exclusive competence are Acuerdos [Resolutions]. The Cámara del Senado [Senate]’s presiding officer presides over Congreso [Congress], with the Cámara de Diputados [Chamber of Deputies]’ presiding officer as Vicepresidente del Congreso [Vice-President of Congress]. (Arts. 74–76; cont., 1929, Arts. 74–76).
In joint session Congreso [Congress] conducts assigned elections, considers presidential resignation, examines the annual presidential message and ministerial reports and accounts, admits qualifying territories as Estados [States], and reviews Créditos Adicionales [additional appropriations] under the provision numbered Art. 100(31). Approval of Créditos Adicionales [additional appropriations] is expressed as “si se hubieren acordado con los límites indicados en la Atribución 31 del Artículo 100”. (Art. 77; cf. 1929, Art. 77(6): “in accordance with the indicated procedures”).
The Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] decree national taxes and loans, regulate national debt, create and suppress federal offices, legislate on federal administration and currency, authorize disposal of national immovable property, enact the national budget, examine the census, establish territorial administration, and adjust the population base for deputies. They legislate on pensions and military retirement benefits, decree war, require peace negotiations, regulate military recruitment and replacement, grant amnistías [amnesties], and legislate on ports, coasts, and the other matters assigned to federal competence. Art. 78(4) prints “podrá autorizarse la circulación forzosa”; Art. 78(18) includes “Construcción Pública”. (Art. 78(1–4, 6–7, 9–19); cf. 1929, Art. 78(4, 18): “in no case and for no reason may compulsory circulation be decreed or authorized […] Public Instruction”).
Treaties and diplomatic conventions require legislative approval before ratification or exchange. The timing of the Ejecútese [Let it be executed] on the approving law is expressed as “queda confinado a la discreción del Ejecutivo Federal” in accordance with international usage and the conduct of foreign relations. Official publication follows ratification and exchange. (Art. 78(5); cf. 1929, Art. 78(5): “The approving law enacted by Congreso [Congress] shall not receive the ‘Let it be executed’ until it is established that the treaty has been accepted by the other party.”).
The Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] standardize national weights and measures under the system printed as “sistema métrico nacional”. (Art. 78(8); cf. 1929, Art. 78(8): “according to the metric decimal system”).
A bill may originate in either Chamber upon introduction by at least three members, or through the competent minister on behalf of the executive. After admission it receives three debates separated by at least one day, followed by the same procedure in the other Chamber and return to the originating Chamber with any amendments. (Arts. 79–81; cont., 1929, Arts. 79–81).
Art. 82 prints the condition “Si la Cámara iniciadora admitiere las alteraciones” before allowing that Chamber to insist on its bill with written reasons. If agreement is not reached, Congreso [Congress] jointly discusses the disputed and connected articles and decides by majority, with authority to adopt different wording. (Art. 82; cf. 1929, Art. 82: “If the originating Chamber does not accept the alterations”).
Rejected bills cannot be resubmitted before the following year’s sessions. Pending bills require fresh presentation and the full debate procedure in a later year. A law amending another is enacted in full and repeals the previous law entirely; repeal follows the formalities for enactment. (Arts. 83–84, 86–87; cont., 1929, Arts. 83–84, 86–87).
Laws use the formula naming Congreso [Congress] followed by “Decrees”. Enacted texts are prepared in duplicate without alteration, signed and dated by congressional officers, and sent for presidential and ministerial countersignature and official publication. Printing errors require corrected republication or certified errata. A law takes effect on its stated date or, failing that, upon official publication. Legislative power cannot be delegated. (Arts. 85, 88–91; cont., 1929, Arts. 85, 88–91).
Legislation is not retroactive except when it imposes a lesser penalty. Procedural laws apply immediately to pending proceedings; previously taken evidence in criminal cases is assessed under the earlier law insofar as that benefits the accused. (Art. 92; cont., 1929, Art. 92).
ECO-HAC—Treasury
Taxes require legal authorization, and national expenditure requires a budget appropriation or a previously decreed Crédito Adicional [Additional Appropriation]. Officials who infringe this rule are civilly liable to the Tesoro Nacional [National Treasury] for the sums paid. Congreso [Congress] legislates on national taxes, credit, debt, currency, property disposal, and the budget; no specific expenditure may be ordered outside the budget by a special law or resolution. (Arts. 48, 78(1–3), 78(4) (currency competence), 78(7, 9); cont., 1929, Arts. 48, 78(1–3), 78(4) (currency competence), 78(7, 9)).
Compulsory circulation of banknotes or paper representations of value is prohibited, and the gold standard is retained. Federal competence includes currency, customs, the territorial tax collected at customs, stamp and other specified national taxes, saltworks, tierras baldías [ungranted public lands], pearl fisheries, and mines. Exports remain free of taxation. The banknote provision reads “podrá autorizarse la circulación forzosa”. (Arts. 15(12, 14, 17–18), 78(4); cf. 1929, Art. 78(4): “in no case and for no reason may compulsory circulation be decreed or authorized”).
Estados [States] retain ownership of saltworks, tierras baldías [ungranted public lands], their products, pearl fisheries, and mines within their jurisdiction, while the Ejecutivo Federal [federal executive] administers them. Saltworks are inalienable, mining concessions temporary, and tierras baldías [public lands] may be sold, leased, or granted, with statutory preference for occupants. Island tierras baldías [public lands] cannot be alienated or transferred indirectly through use concessions. The revenues enter the Tesoro Nacional [National Treasury]. (Art. 15(18); cont., 1929, Art. 15(18)).
The Situado Constitucional [Constitutional Allocation] equals twelve per cent of national revenue received in the previous calendar year and is distributed among Estados [States], the Distrito Federal [Federal District], and Territorios Federales [Federal Territories] in proportion to population. State revenues also include stamped-paper, consumption, and other lawful taxes. Estados [States] cannot establish customs or levy the prohibited import, export, transit, federal, or municipal taxes, discriminate against outside products, tax goods before consumption, or impose taxes payable in personal labour or its monetary equivalent. The transit clause in Art. 17(4)(3)(b) prints “cualquiera que sea su procedencia, que pase para otro Estado”. (Art. 17(4); cf. 1929, Art. 17(4)(3)(b): “nor goods, whatever their provenance, passing to another State”).
The prohibition on requiring federal assistance in collecting state taxes refers to “administración local federal” in the 1931 recension. (Art. 17(4)(3)(d); cf. 1929, Art. 17(4)(3)(d): “the federal fiscal administration”).
Municipalidades [Municipalities] organize their revenues under the state-tax restrictions and the prohibition on licence taxes upon agriculture, livestock raising, and fishing for edible fish. Estados [States] and Municipalidades [Municipalities] cannot borrow abroad; public-interest contracts cannot be transferred to foreign governments or made with companies not legally domiciled in Venezuela, and contractual disputes belong to Venezuelan courts without foreign claims. For national and state licence taxes on those industries, Art. 18(3) reads “Estas industrias podrán tampoco ser gravadas con patentes Nacionales ni de los Estados”. (Arts. 18(3), 24, 50; cf. 1929, Art. 18(3): “Nor may these industries be taxed”).
Additional appropriations require the Presidente de la República [president] in the Consejo de Ministros [Council of Ministers] to establish an insufficient budget chapter or an unforeseen expense and available funds without impairing ordinary expenditure, which has priority. Congreso [Congress] examines them under the clause “con los límites indicados”. The minister responsible for “la Administración General de las Cuentas de la Nación” submits annually “el Presupuesto General de Rentas y Gastos Públicos”, prepared in consultation with the other ministers; ministers account for the funds they administer. Civil pensions and military retirement and survivor benefits are regulated by general laws and funded in aggregate budget allocations. (Arts. 77(6), 78(13), 100(31), 109; cf. 1929, Arts. 77(6), 109: “in accordance with the indicated procedures […] General Administration of the Revenues of the Nation […] the Draft Law of the General Budget of Public Revenues and Expenditures”).
POW-EXE—Executive
Sovereignty resides in the people and is exercised through the public powers. Public power is distributed among the federal, state, and municipal levels; federal power comprises legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Defined powers limit each authority; excess constitutes usurpation, and the law determines the nullity of acts exceeding competence. Decisions obtained through force or a subversive popular assembly are null. (Arts. 40–43, 51; cont., 1929, Arts. 40–43, 51).
Federal administration not constitutionally assigned elsewhere belongs to the Poder Ejecutivo Federal [Federal Executive Power], exercised by the Presidente de los Estados Unidos de Venezuela [President of the United States of Venezuela] through federal employees and agents, with state assistance where constitutionally permitted. (Arts. 93–94; cont., 1929, Arts. 93–94).
The Presidente de la República [president] must be Venezuelan by birth, over thirty, and in possession of civil and political rights. Between the age and rights requirements, the recension prints the words “de estado”. (Art. 95; cf. 1929, Art. 95: “of estado seglar [lay status]”).
Congreso [Congress] elects the Presidente de la República [president] within the first fifteen days of its installation in the year beginning the constitutional term, with at least five days’ published notice. The Presidente de la República [president] takes the oath before Congreso [Congress], or before the Corte Federal y de Casación [Federal and Cassation Court] when unable to do so before Congreso [Congress]. (Arts. 96, 99; cont., 1929, Arts. 96, 99).
A designated minister fills temporary presidential absences. Congreso [Congress] fills a permanent vacancy for the rest of the term and is summoned extraordinarily if necessary. Until the Presidente electo [elected president] takes office, the minister already acting continues; if none is acting, the Gabinete [Cabinet] elects a minister by majority. Absence from the capital within the Republic does not constitute temporary absence from office; the Presidente de la República [president] may send instructions to ministers and receive foreign diplomatic ministers elsewhere in the country. (Arts. 97–98, 100(4); cont., 1929, Arts. 97–98, 100(2)).
Federal constitutional periods run for seven years from 19 April 1929. Presidential service lasts from the oath until 19 April of the final year, when executive power passes to the member or alternate designated by the Corte Federal y de Casación [Federal and Cassation Court], who remains until the successor elected by Congreso [Congress] takes office. (Arts. 54, 103, 120(17); cont., 1929, Arts. 54, 103, 120(17)).
The Presidente de la República [president] is always Comandante en Jefe del Ejército Nacional [Commander-in-Chief of the National Army]. Presidential powers include commanding the Ejército [Army], Aviación [Aviation], and Armada [Navy] personally or through appointees, fixing the strength of the land and sea forces, regulating that command, and directing war. (Arts. 45, 100(2–3); cf. 1929, Art. 128: “Congreso [Congress] shall elect, for the current constitutional period, a Comandante en Jefe del Ejército Nacional [Commander-in-Chief of the National Army]”).
The Presidente de la República [president] may entrust the presidency temporarily to a minister and resume it within the term. The Presidente de la República [president] retains command and direction of war under powers 2 and 3; the acting minister must exercise powers 1, 6, 7, 19, 20, 25, 27, and 28 in agreement with him. These concern ministers, the Distrito Federal [Federal District] and territories, extraordinary congressional sessions, declaration of war, emergency powers, armed conflict between Estados [States], and functions delegated by state constitutions. (Art. 100(8); cf. 1929, Arts. 100(6), 128: “with whom the Presidente de la República [President of the Republic] shall exercise in agreement powers 1, 4, 17, 18, 23, 25 and 27 of Article 100 of the Constitution”).
The Presidente de la República [president] appoints and removes ministers, receives foreign diplomatic ministers, signs official letters to heads of state, and administers the Distrito Federal [Federal District] and Territorios Federales [Federal Territories]. (Art. 100(1, 4–7); cont., 1929, Art. 100(1–5)).
The Presidente de la República [president] orders execution and publication of the Constitution and laws; issues implementing decrees and regulations in the Consejo de Ministros [Council of Ministers] without altering their spirit, purpose, or reason; negotiates authorized loans; regulates health, postal, telegraph, and telephone services; and orders the census and submits it to Congreso [Congress]. (Art. 100(9–13); cont., 1929, Art. 100(7–11)).
Through the competent ministers the Presidente de la República [president] issues navigation licences and nationality certificates, appoints and removes national officials whose selection belongs to no other authority, and administers national revenues. With the prescribed Gabinete [Cabinet] or Council approval, the Presidente de la República [president] creates and funds necessary services during legislative recess, orders the Ministerio Público Federal [Federal Public Ministry] to prosecute officials, and convenes Congreso [Congress] extraordinarily. The Presidente de la República [president] declares war when Congreso [Congress] has decreed it. (Art. 100(14–21); cont., 1929, Art. 100(12–19)).
The Presidente de la República [president] conducts diplomatic negotiations personally or through the competent minister and concludes treaties through chosen plenipotentiaries with Council approval and subsequent legislative approval. Treaties cannot impair Arts. 37–39 and must provide for settlement of differences over interpretation or execution by peaceful means recognized in international law. (Art. 100(22); cf. 1929, Art. 100(20): “shall be decided by arbitration”).
The Presidente de la República [president] concludes authorized national-interest contracts through the competent ministers with Council approval and submits them to Congreso [Congress]; may prohibit foreign entry and expel foreigners in legally permitted cases; and, during war, exercises the specified emergency powers, including requesting state assistance, relocating federal powers, ordering treason prosecutions, reorganizing rebel-held Estados [States], issuing patentes de corso [letters of marque], and authorizing reprisals. (Art. 100(23–25); cont., 1929, Art. 100(21–23)).
Official visits with ministers to Estados [States] or territories require regulation of current administration in Caracas. Art. 100(26) states “el Poder Ejecutivo Federal será el sitio donde se hallare el Presidente”. The Presidente de la República [president] may end armed conflict between Estados [States] after good offices fail, grant indultos [pardons], and issue public-land and mining-concession titles. Art. 100(28) names the delegated powers as “las acciones que éstos le delegaren”. (Art. 100(26–30); cf. 1929, Art. 100(24, 26): “the seat of the Poder Ejecutivo Federal [Federal Executive Power] shall be the place where the Presidente [president] is located […] the functions which they delegate to him”).
The Presidente de la República [president] accounts annually to Congreso [Congress] for administrative acts and the state of the Republic, personally or through a minister, within the first ten days of ordinary sessions. Presidential responsibility is limited to treason against the Nation and ordinary offences. (Arts. 101 (first paragraph), 102; cont., 1929, Arts. 101 (first paragraph), 102).
The final paragraph of Art. 101 requires presentation of the annual message on 19 April, or its signed deposit with the Encargado de la Presidencia [acting president] if Congreso [Congress] has not assembled, in the year identified by its printed reference to “Artículo 10”. (Art. 101 (final paragraph); cf. 1929, Art. 101 (final paragraph): “In the year referred to in Article 103”).
Ministros del Despacho [Ministers] are the legally required presidential organs; the law determines their departments and duties. Presidential decrees require the competent ministerial countersignature, except appointment of ministers and the acting-presidency arrangement numbered Art. 100(8). A freely appointed and removable governor is the presidential organ in the Distrito Federal [Federal District]. (Arts. 104–105; cont., 1929, Arts. 104–105).
Ministros del Despacho [Ministers] must be Venezuelan by birth, over thirty, and possess civil and political rights. Decisions are made in Gabinete [Cabinet] when the Constitution or law requires it or the Presidente de la República [president] convenes it; otherwise the competent ministers countersign or order execution. Ministros del Despacho [Ministers] remain personally responsible notwithstanding written presidential orders, with joint responsibility for Gabinete [Cabinet] decisions. (Arts. 106–108; cont., 1929, Arts. 106–108).
Ministros del Despacho [Ministers] submit reasoned and documented reports and accounts within the first ten days of annual sessions, and in the final presidential year on 19 April or by deposit with the Encargado de la Presidencia [acting president] for later transmission. They have the right to speak in the Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] and must attend when summoned. (Arts. 109 (first and final paragraphs), 110; cont., 1929, Arts. 109 (first and final paragraphs), 110).
The prohibition on holding two paid public offices excepts the preceding article on combined civil and military authority. Otherwise acceptance of a second office vacates the first, with exceptions for inactive alternates and employment in academies, hospitals, incidental courts, and teaching institutions. (Art. 46; cf. 1929, Art. 46: “No individual may hold more than one paid public office at the same time.”).
Officials bear individual responsibility for exceeding constitutional powers or violating the law governing their office, subject to the presidential rule in Art. 102, and are punishable for other offences. Acceptance of foreign gifts, offices, honours, or rewards requires Cámara del Senado [Senate] authorization. The law governs the oath taken upon entering national public employment. (Arts. 44, 49, 53; cont., 1929, Arts. 44, 49, 53).
POW-JUD—Judiciary
Judicial power resides in the Corte Federal y de Casación [Federal and Cassation Court] and the other courts established by law. Federal judges are appointed for a fixed period and may be removed during it only in cases determined by law. (Arts. 116–117; cont., 1929, Arts. 116–117).
The Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] has seven Vocales [Members], Venezuelan by birth, over thirty, and lawyers of the Republic, serving seven years and remaining until replaced. It acts in Salas [Divisions] constituted by law. Congreso [Congress] elects each member separately by absolute majority within the first thirty days of sessions in the opening year of the period, together with seven numbered alternates. Alternates fill temporary and permanent vacancies in order; the Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] fills incidental absences, and Congreso [Congress] replenishes the list. (Arts. 118–119; cont., 1929, Arts. 118–119).
The Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] hears accusations against the Presidente de la República [president] or Encargado de la Presidencia [acting president], ministers, the Procurador General [Procurator General], the Distrito Federal [Federal District] governor, its own members, Presidentes de los Estados [state presidents], and designated senior state officials. It hears the specified cases concerning diplomatic officials, recursos de casación [appeals in cassation] and other assigned appeals, causas de presas [prize cases], intergovernmental disputes, and conflicts of judicial competence where no other competent authority exists. (Art. 120(1–8); cont., 1929, Art. 120(1–8)).
The Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] annuls national or state laws conflicting with the Constitution, limiting nullity to the conflicting provisions unless their connection requires invalidation of the whole law. It resolves conflicts between laws or their provisions and annuls acts violating state rights or autonomy and the prescribed restrictions on state and municipal taxation. (Art. 120(9–11); cont., 1929, Art. 120(9–11)).
The Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] annuls executive regulations altering the spirit, reason, or purpose of laws and the acts within Arts. 42–43 issued by national or Distrito Federal [Federal District] authorities or senior state officials. Ministerial resolutions concerning execution, interpretation, or lapse of a federal contract require contentious proceedings under the following provision. (Art. 120(12); cont., 1929, Art. 120(12)).
An action seeking nullity of an administrative act for illegality or abuse of power expires thirteen months after publication of the act. Illegality may always be pleaded as a defence. (Art. 120(12), second paragraph; new; 1929, Art. 120(12): no corresponding provision).
In contentious proceedings the Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] decides disputes concerning federal contracts, mining concessions, public-land grants, and refusal of titles claimed as due, except matters reserved by the applicable law to executive decision without judicial recourse. It also hears claims for damages and other monetary claims against the Nation, and boundary disputes. (Art. 120(13, 15–16); cont., 1929, Art. 120(13, 15–16)).
The Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] gives foreign judgments enforceable effect under statutory conditions, subject to the printed reservation concerning “dictados públicos”. (Art. 120(14); cf. 1929, Art. 120(14): “subject to the provisions of public treaties”).
The Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] designates the member or alternate who exercises the executive at the constitutional transition, and performs its other legally assigned federal functions. For accusations against officials within Art. 120(1–2), it first decides whether grounds for proceedings exist; an affirmative decision suspends the accused from office. Ordinary offences pass to the competent ordinary court; political offences remain before the Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] through final judgment. The Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] submits an annual report and proposed legal reforms to Congreso [Congress]. (Arts. 120(17–18), 121–122; cont., 1929, Arts. 120(17–18), 121–122).
The Ministerio Público Federal [Federal Public Ministry] represents the Ejecutivo Federal [federal executive] before federal and, when necessary, state courts. It is headed by the Procurador General de la Nación [Procurator General of the Nation], freely appointed and removed by the Presidente de la República [president], with subordinate appointments regulated by law. Its duties include securing lawful adjudication in the specified cases, providing legal opinions, conducting the fiscal ministry in proceedings against designated officials, and defending the Nation in litigation under executive instructions. (Arts. 111–115; cont., 1929, Arts. 111–115).
At the executive’s request the Procurador General [Procurator General] initiates accusations against federal officials who give grounds for prosecution. (Art. 114(3); cf. 1929, Art. 114(3): “accusation against officials who give grounds for prosecution”).
Federal judicial competence extends to the Corte Federal y de Casación [Court], ordinary courts in the Distrito Federal [Federal District] and Territorios Federales [Federal Territories], and federal courts acting in the Estados [States] in the listed national, military, land, mining, salt, and tax matters and other statutory cases. (Art. 15(7); cf. 1929, Art. 15(7): “The law may assign to the courts of the Estados [States] the functions of federal courts.”).
POW-SUB—Subnational Government
The Estados [States] recognize one another’s autonomy and political equality and retain sovereignty not delegated. They must preserve national independence, integrity, and unity, and may neither ally with foreign powers, seek their protection, nor cede them territory. (Art. 12; cf. 1929, Art. 12: “the sovereignty not delegated in this Constitution”).
The Union and each State have republican, federal, democratic, elective, representative, responsible, and alternating government. Districts enjoy municipal autonomy in administration, subject to constitutional restrictions; during foreign or civil war the state executive may also assume district administration under the constitutional provision. (Arts. 13–14; cont., 1929, Arts. 13–14).
Estados [States] reserve to federal competence international relations; national symbols and honours; protection of national interests and peace; the listed civil, commercial, penal, procedural, economic, health, natural-resource, labour, intellectual-property, registry, migration, and guarantees legislation; weights and measures; supervision of national law; the census; and organization of the Distrito Federal [Federal District], territories, and dependencies. They must execute federal laws and lawful federal orders in those matters. (Arts. 15(1–6, 10–11, 20), 16; cont., 1929, Arts. 15(1–6, 10–11, 20), 16).
Estados [States] adopt their constitutions and organic laws and elect their public powers. The 1931 text permits delegation of specified powers to the Presidente de la República [president] through state constitutions and laws. (Art. 17(1–2); cf. 1929, Art. 17(2): “in the Constitutions of those Estados [States] which so decide”).
Estados [States] administer civil and criminal justice except matters reserved to federal judges; their judgments are reviewable only through the legally prescribed recourses to the Corte Federal y de Casación [Federal and Cassation Court]. Municipalidades [Municipalities] organize police, supplies, cemeteries, ornamentation, civil architecture, lighting, waterworks, urban tramways, and similar services; their sanitary service follows federal law and inspection. They administer ejidos [municipal common lands] and their own land, which may be alienated only for construction. The sanitary-inspection clause reads “bajo la inspección del servicio sanitario federal”. (Arts. 17(3), 18(1–2); cf. 1929, Art. 18(1): “under the supreme supervision of the federal sanitary service”).
The residual reservation of state rights describes the Estados [States] as “entidades económicas”. (Art. 17(5); cf. 1929, Art. 17(5): “autonomous entities”).
Estados [States] and Municipalidades [Municipalities] recognize and execute the public and judicial acts of other federal entities. Federal judges, public-ministry officials, administrative employees, tax officers, and designated forces may serve within the Estados [States]; their jurisdiction is confined to their functions, without personal privilege or incompatible state duties. Federal works may be constructed in state territory. (Arts. 19–21; cont., 1929, Arts. 19–21).
Estados [States] cannot permit recruitment directed against foreign independence or domestic peace, wage war against one another, or abandon neutrality in interstate disputes unless required to act by the federal government. Two or more Estados [States] may unite while retaining the right to recover autonomy, with notice to the Ejecutivo Federal [federal executive], Congreso [Congress], and the other Estados [States]. (Arts. 22–23, 25; cont., 1929, Arts. 22–23, 25).
Official documents use the calendar date and the eras of Independence, counted from 19 April 1810, and Federation, counted from 20 February 1859. Existing state constitutions remain in force until repealed by the Estados [States]. (Arts. 26, 129; cont., 1929, Arts. 26, 131).
CON-AMD—Amending the Constitution
Congreso [Congress] declares total or partial constitutional reform in ordinary sessions upon requests from three-quarters of Asambleas Legislativas [state legislatures] in ordinary sessions; amendments and additions concern the points on which a majority of Estados [States] agree. They follow the legislative procedure and are submitted to the Asambleas Legislativas [state legislatures] for ratification. (Arts. 123–125; cont., 1929, Arts. 123–125).
Congreso [Congress] may itself initiate amendments and additions, which require ratification by two-thirds of Asambleas Legislativas [state legislatures]. Whether the initiative originates with the Estados [States] or the Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers], the final state vote returns to Congreso [Congress] for scrutiny. (Arts. 126–127; cont., 1929, Arts. 126–127).
CIV-SUF—Suffrage
Venezuelans over twenty-one, not subject to interdiction or a penal conviction involving political disqualification, are electors and eligible for public office, subject to constitutional restrictions and statutory requirements of competence or capacity. (Art. 32(12); cont., 1929, Art. 32(12)).
State constitutions must provide direct and secret voting for Concejos Municipales [municipal councils], Asambleas Legislativas [state legislatures], and congressional deputies on the basis of the Censo electoral [electoral register] under federal law.Diputados [Deputies] are directly elected under Arts. 56 and 58; senators are elected by Asambleas Legislativas [state legislatures] from outside their membership. Congreso [Congress] elects the Presidente de la República [president] and members of the Corte Federal y de Casación [Federal and Cassation Court]. (Arts. 17(1), 56, 58, 60, 96, 119; cont., 1929, Arts. 17(1), 56, 58, 60, 96, 119).
CIV-CIT—Citizenship
Venezuelan nationality is held by birth or acquired by naturalización [naturalization]. Birth nationality includes persons born in the Republic and children of Venezuelan parents wherever born. Naturalization includes adult children born abroad of a naturalized Venezuelan father or mother who establish domicile in Venezuela and declare their intention to be Venezuelan; persons born in Ibero-American republics who reside in Venezuela and declare their intention; recipients of naturalización [naturalization] certificates; and foreign women married to Venezuelans during marriage or, upon declaration within the year following dissolution, after that dissolution. (Arts. 27–29; cont., 1929, Arts. 27–29).
The prescribed declarations are made before the principal registrar of the domicile, entered in the protocol, and transmitted for official publication after statutory formalities. Nationality is not acquired before publication. Venezuelans must defend the Nation, obey the Constitution, laws, and lawful public orders, and may not undertake service against Venezuela. Foreigners’ rights and duties are determined by law and cannot exceed Venezuelans’ rights and duties. (Arts. 30–31, 37; cont., 1929, Arts. 30–31, 37).
Foreigners taking part in Venezuelan political conflicts incur the same responsibilities as Venezuelans and the measures specified in Art. 36(3). Nationals and foreigners cannot claim public compensation for damage, loss, or expropriations not caused by legitimate authorities acting officially. (Arts. 38–39; cf. 1929, Art. 38: “number V of Article 36”).
RTS-GAR—Rights
Life is inviolable and the death penalty cannot be established or applied. Property is subject to lawful taxation and taking for public-utility works only through juicio contradictorio [adversarial proceedings] and prior compensation. Owners must observe statutory public-health and conservation obligations for the community’s benefit. The conservation provision names “bosques y sábanas”. (Art. 32(1–2); cf. 1929, Art. 32(2): “forests and waters”).
Postal and telegraphic correspondence and private papers are inviolable; seizure requires a competent judicial order and statutory formalities, preserving the secrecy of private matters unrelated to the case. Entry into the home is limited to preventing offences, executing lawful judicial decisions, and sanitary visits authorized by law. (Art. 32(3–4); cont., 1929, Art. 32(3–4)).
Personal liberty includes abolition of forcible military recruitment, with service governed by law; perpetual prohibition of slavery and freedom for enslaved persons entering the Republic; and freedom to do what harms no other person, with no obligation or prohibition except as established by law. (Art. 32(5); cont., 1929, Art. 32(5)).
Freedom of thought extends to speech, writing, and print, subject to statutory punishment for insult, calumny, defamation, or incitement to offend. Communist propaganda remains prohibited. (Art. 32(6); cf. 1929, Art. 32(6): “insult, calumny, defamation, outrage or incitement to offend”).
Freedom of movement includes travel without a passport, change of domicile under legal formalities, departure and return with property. Work and industry are free subject to public order and good morals; monopolies are prohibited. Statutory privilegios temporales [temporary privileges] may cover intellectual property, inventions, trademarks, and the listed transport and communications concessions financed by concessionaires without guaranteed returns or public subsidy. (Art. 32(7–8); cont., 1929, Art. 32(7–8)).
Unarmed public or private assembly is free from official coercion; association remains subject to statutory restrictions. Petitioners are entitled to a timely response, and citizens may accuse officials before competent courts for breach of duty. Teaching is free. (Art. 32(9–11, 13); cont., 1929, Art. 32(9–11, 13)).
Individual security prohibits imprisonment for non-criminal debt, specially constituted tribunals, detention without preliminary evidence and a reasoned written order except in flagrante delicto, and incommunicado detention. The preliminary investigation cannot continue for more than thirty days after detention. (Art. 32(15)(a–d); cont., 1929, Art. 32(15)(a–d)).
No person may be compelled to swear or submit to criminal interrogation against himself, his ascendants, or relatives within the fourth degree of consanguinity or second of affinity. (Art. 32(15)(e); cf. 1929, Art. 32(15)(e): “nor against the spouse”).
Detention must cease when a final judicial decision removes its basis or sufficient lawful bail is given. Criminal punishment requires personal notice of the charge and a hearing. Penalties restricting personal liberty cannot exceed twenty years; infamous and perpetual penalties are prohibited. No person may be tried twice for the same offence. (Art. 32(15)(f–i); cont., 1929, Art. 32(15)(f–i)).
Equality requires common laws and protection, equal duties and contributions, and exemptions only where law permits. Hereditary distinctions, nobility titles, and remuneration continuing beyond service are prohibited. Official forms of address are citizen and usted, except diplomatic forms. The enumeration does not deny other rights. Laws and municipal ordinances impairing guaranteed rights are null, as declared by the Corte Federal y de Casación [Court]; officials responsible for violating guarantees are punishable, subject to the stated emergency exception. (Arts. 32(16), 33–35; cont., 1929, Arts. 32(16), 33–35).
In foreign or civil war, or imminent danger of either, the Presidente de la República [president] in the Consejo de Ministros [Council of Ministers] declares the circumstances and suspends guarantees nationally or in a specified area until peace is restored. Life remains inviolable, infamous punishments prohibited, and confiscation barred except reciprocal wartime reprisals against enemy nationals. Arrest, confinement, and expulsion measures against persons opposed to peace end with their causes, except that foreign expulsions may remain. (Art. 36; cont., 1929, Art. 36).
REG-MIL—The Military
Ejército [Army], Armada [Navy], and Aviación Militar [Military Aviation] are federal matters.Estados [States] and Municipalidades [Municipalities] may maintain only police and prison guards unless otherwise ordered federally. Ejército [Army] contingents are apportioned by population; legislation regulates citizen militias and may provide contractual enlistment. All war materiel in or entering the country belongs to the Nation. (Art. 15(8); cont., 1929, Art. 15(8)).
Civil and military authority cannot be exercised by the same official except the Presidente de la República [president], who is always Comandante en Jefe del Ejército Nacional [Commander-in-Chief of the National Army], or a civil official assigned military functions under law in wartime. The Presidente de la República [president] commands the Ejército [Army], Aviación [Aviation], and Armada [Navy] and directs war. (Arts. 45, 100(2–3); cf. 1929, Arts. 45, 128: “except the Presidente de la República [President of the Republic], or in case of war”).
Armed forces are non-deliberative, passive, and obedient; they may demand assistance only through civil authorities under law and remain quartered during electoral periods. Commanders who infringe these rules are punishable. Estados [States] cannot organize recruitment against foreign independence or internal peace, or wage war upon one another. The Cámara del Senado [Senate] approves specified senior promotions; Congreso [Congress] legislates on military recruitment, replacement, pensions, ports, and coasts and decrees war. (Arts. 22–23, 47, 62(3), 78(13–15, 17); cont., 1929, Arts. 22–23, 47, 62(3), 78(13–15, 17)).
The Presidente de la República [president] elected on 19 June of the current year assumes office upon taking the oath and serves the remainder of the constitutional term. Until that inauguration, military command remains with the Comandante en Jefe del Ejército Nacional [Commander-in-Chief of the National Army]. (Art. 128 (first paragraph); cf. 1929, Arts. 128–129: “The election of the Presidente de la República [President of the Republic] and that of the Commander-in-Chief of the Ejército [Army] for the period from 1929 to 1936”).
REG-REL—Religion
Religious freedom remains subject to supreme executive supervision of worship under the laws and preservation of Patronato Eclesiástico [ecclesiastical patronage]. (Art. 32(14); cont., 1929, Art. 32(14)).
The Nation exercises Patronato Eclesiástico [Ecclesiastical Patronage] under the law dated in the recension 28 July 1928. (Art. 52; cf. 1929, Art. 52: “the law of 28 July 1824”).
The presidential qualification is printed as “de estado” between the age and civil-and-political-rights requirements. (Art. 95; cf. 1929, Art. 95: “of estado seglar [lay status]”).
ECO-INF—Infrastructure
Federal competence covers air, maritime, and river navigation, docks and landing works, postal, telegraph, telephone, and wireless services, national roads crossing federal-entity boundaries, aerial haulage cables, and railways. Urban tramways and haulage cables remain municipal matters. Navigation on waterways requiring no special works cannot be restricted by taxes or privileges. Federal public works do not preclude state or municipal works. The railway clause reads “y que estén dentro de los límites de un Estado”. (Art. 15(13, 15–16, 19); cf. 1929, Art. 15(16): “even when situated within the boundaries of a State”).
Federal works in state territory include forts, docks, warehouses, shipyards, penitentiaries, and quarantine stations. Municipal services include lighting, waterworks, civil architecture, and urban tramways. Congressional approval is required for the specified railway, aerial-cable, communications, immigration, and other national-interest contracts, except mining concessions and public-land titles issued under their laws. (Arts. 18(1) (lighting, waterworks, civil architecture, and urban tramways), 21, 78(6); cont., 1929, Arts. 18(1) (lighting, waterworks, civil architecture, and urban tramways), 21, 78(6)).
Congreso [Congress] legislates on navigation, docks, postal and communications services, railways, national roads and mechanically propelled traffic, tierras baldías [public lands], saltworks, pearl fisheries, and mines. The Presidente de la República [president] regulates the enumerated communications and health services and issues navigation, public-land, and mining titles. Temporary transport and communications privileges remain subject to the constitutional financing restrictions. The legislative list also contains “Construcción Pública”. (Arts. 32(8), 78(18), 100(12, 14, 30); cf. 1929, Art. 78(18): “Public Instruction”).
Federal law governs public instruction; primary instruction is compulsory and instruction in official institutions is free. (Art. 15(9); cf. 1929, Art. 15(9): “Elementary primary instruction is compulsory”).
The Estados [States] and Municipalidades [Municipalities] cooperate in national census and statistical work under law. Official acts requiring a population base use the most recent census approved by Congreso [Congress], for the Nation, Estados [States], Distrito Federal [Federal District], and Territorios Federales [Federal Territories]. The census is conducted at the intervals established by law. (Art. 15(10); cont., 1929, Art. 15(10)).
CON-FIN—Final Provisions
The Presidente de la República [president] elected on 19 June 1931 assumes office on taking the oath and serves the remainder of the constitutional period; military command remains with the Commander-in-Chief until that inauguration. The period beginning on 19 April 1929 continues for the legislative and judicial branches. Existing state constitutions remain in force until repealed. (Arts. 128–129; cf. 1929, Arts. 128–131: “the current officials shall continue to serve until the end of the period for which they were elected”).
The Constitution is promulgated once congressional scrutiny establishes state ratification and takes effect upon publication in the Gaceta Oficial [Official Gazette]. (Art. 130; cf. 1929, Art. 132: “with the ‘Let it be executed’ of the Encargado del Poder Ejecutivo [Acting Head of the Executive Power]”).
The Constitution drafted on 29 May 1929, ordered complied with by the Acting Head of the Executive and published that day, is repealed. The 1931 constitutional closing bears 7 July; its execution formula bears 9 July and the signature P. ITRIAGO-CHACIN. (Art. 131; closing and execution formulas; cf. 1929, Art. 133: “The Constitution issued on 23 May 1928 is repealed”).
Sanctioning Agreement
The agreement declares the Constitution sanctioned, directs its signature by the members of Congreso [Congress] and the presentation of an authentic copy to the Encargado del Poder Ejecutivo [Acting Head of the Executive Power] for execution, and orders publication of the agreement with the Constitution. Its introductory recital records ratification with the printed word “únicamente”. (CIDEP 1931, p. 3, agreement, introductory recital and Arts. 1–2).
Recension
Centro para la Integración y el Derecho Público [Centre for Integration and Public Law] (CIDEP).
The 1936 Constitución de los Estados Unidos de Venezuela [Constitution of the United States of Venezuela] was declared sanctioned by the congressional agreement dated 16 July 1936 at the Palacio Federal Legislativo [Federal Legislative Palace], Caracas. The constitutional closing bears that date; President Eleazar López Contreras ordered its execution at the Palacio Federal [Federal Palace], Caracas, on 20 July 1936. (CIDEP 1936, pp. 3, 26–27, agreement, closing and execution formulas).
(modern Latinate English translation by the author from the CIDEP recension)
“The Congreso de los Estados Unidos de Venezuela [Congress of the United States of Venezuela], in the name of Almighty God, and in exercise of the authority conferred upon it by Article 126 of the Federal Pact in force, decrees this Constitution.”
(CIDEP 1936, p. 4, preamble).
FND-TER—Territory
The Nación Venezolana [Venezuelan Nation] consists of all Venezuelans in a political pact named the Estados Unidos de Venezuela [United States of Venezuela] and remains permanently and irrevocably free from foreign domination or protection. National territory comprises Estados [States], the Distrito Federal [Federal District], Territorios Federales [Federal Territories], and Dependencias Federales [Federal Dependencies]; the twenty Estados [States] are Anzoátegui, Apure, Aragua, Bolívar, Carabobo, Cojedes, Falcón, Guárico, Lara, Mérida, Miranda, Monagas, Nueva Esparta, Portuguesa, Sucre, Táchira, Trujillo, Yaracuy, Zamora, and Zulia. (Arts. 1, 3–4; cont., 1931, Arts. 1, 3–4).
Territory remains that of the Capitanía General de Venezuela [Captaincy General of Venezuela] before 1810, as modified by treaties. The prohibition on alienation to a foreign power, even temporarily, applies to the whole territory or any part. (Art. 2; cf. 1931, Art. 2: “This territory may never be ceded, transferred, leased or otherwise alienated”).
State boundaries derive from the 1856 provincial law, subsequent federal entities, the Constitution dated 5 August 1909, and later boundaries declared or agreed between Estados [States]. Neighbouring Estados [States] may make reciprocal territorial compensation or cessions and restore previous cessions by agreements approved by their legislatures. (Art. 5; cf. 1931, Art. 5: “and those agreed in 1917 between the Estados [States] of Aragua and Carabobo”).
The Distrito Federal [Federal District] comprises the departments printed as Libertad and Vargas. The first includes Caracas, El Recreo, El Valle, La Vega, Antímano, and Maracao; Vargas includes La Guaira, Maiquetia, Macuto, Caraballeda, Carayaca, Naiguatá, and Caruao. A special law preserves federal political action; the municipality is autonomous in economic and administrative affairs, subject to Art. 18(3). (Art. 6; cf. 1931, Art. 6: “The Distrito Federal [Federal District] shall be organized by special law and shall comprise the Departments of Libertador and Vargas.”).
Caracas is the capital and federal seat, subject to temporary relocation and official visits, referenced as Art. 100(23)(b) and (24). Amazonas and Delta Amacuro remain Territorios Federales [Federal Territories] organized by special laws; boundary agreements with neighbouring Estados [States] require federal and state legislative approval. (Arts. 7–8; cont., 1931, Arts. 7–8).
Existing and future Territorios Federales [Federal Territories] may become Estados [States] upon attaining the deputy population base and demonstrating financial and administrative capacity to Congreso [Congress]. Venezuelan Caribbean islands other than Margarita and Coche remain Dependencias Federales [Federal Dependencies] under direct Ejecutivo Federal [federal executive] government and may be elevated to Territorios Federales [Federal Territories]. The Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] adjudicates boundary disputes. (Arts. 9–11; cf. 1931, Art. 9: “and the others created in accordance with the following Article”).
POW-LEG—Congress
Congreso [Congress] remains bicameral. Senadores [Senators] and deputies serve four years, with half renewed every two years. The first renewal occurs upon approval of the Constitution, determined by Asambleas Legislativas [state legislatures] for senators and assemblies of Concejos Municipales [municipal councils] in the state capitals for deputies; where the number of deputies is odd, the majority is renewed. (Art. 54; cf. 1931, Art. 55: “They shall serve for three years.”).
Municipalidades [Municipalities] assembled within each State elect deputies, one per 35,000 inhabitants and one additional deputy for an excess of 15,000; a State below the base elects one. An equal number of alternates fills vacancies in election order. The Distrito Federal [Federal District] and qualifying Territorios Federales [Federal Territories] elect under the same article, excluding indígenas no reducidos [unreduced Indigenous people] from the population base. (Arts. 55, 57; cf. 1931, Arts. 56, 58: “each State shall elect by direct vote”).
Diputados [Deputies] must be Venezuelan by birth, have completed twenty-five years, and be native to the electing State or Distrito Federal [Federal District] or have resided there during the three immediately preceding years. (Art. 56; cf. 1931, Art. 57: “to be Venezuelan by birth and to have completed twenty-one years”).
The Cámara de Diputados [Chamber of Deputies] retains ministerial censure, without obligatory removal until the Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] finds grounds for trial, and other statutory powers. Each Asamblea Legislativa [state legislature] elects two principal senators and two alternates from outside its own membership. (Arts. 58–59; cont., 1931, Arts. 59–60).
Senadores [Senators] must be Venezuelan by birth and over thirty, and must be native to the represented State or have resided there for the three immediately preceding years. (Art. 60; cf. 1931, Art. 61: “to be Venezuelan by birth and over thirty years of age”).
The Cámara del Senado [Senate] retains powers concerning the Panteón Nacional [National Pantheon], foreign gifts and offices, specified military and naval promotions, and other statutory matters. Annual ordinary sessions begin on 19 April or the nearest possible day and last ninety days without extension; extraordinary sessions remain confined to the convocation and connected legislation. Opening and subsequent quorums remain two-thirds and an absolute majority. (Arts. 61–63; cont., 1931, Arts. 62–64).
Sessions are public unless secrecy is resolved. The Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] regulate their debates, premises, discipline, members’ qualifications and resignations, and execution of exclusive resolutions. Public employment remains incompatible during sessions, and remuneration increases operate only in the next term. (Arts. 64–65, 67–68; cont., 1931, Arts. 65–66, 68–69).
The Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] sit in the same town, open and close together, and require the other’s consent to relocate. Art. 66 refers to suspension before the ninety days fixed by Art. 62; disagreements are resolved in Congreso [Congress]. (Art. 66; cf. 1931, Art. 67: “neither of the two may suspend its sessions or change its residence without the consent of the other”).
Legislative immunity retains its annual interval and protections against detention and obstruction, and applies when members are summoned to extraordinary sessions. Members cannot be compelled to appear in judicial proceedings in any form or for any reason, or to take an oath during the protected period; judicial time limits exclude it. The Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] cannot waive the immunity. (Art. 69; cf. 1931, Art. 70(2): “be obliged to answer claims”).
Members remain free from responsibility for opinions expressed in their Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] and cannot contract with the Ejecutivo Federal [federal executive] for themselves or others or pursue third-party claims before it. (Arts. 70–71; cont., 1931, Arts. 71–72).
The corresponding Asamblea Legislativa [state legislature] fills a depleted list of senatorial alternates for the remainder of the term. State constitutions and the Distrito Federal [Federal District]’s organic law determine deputy replacements. (Art. 72; cf. 1931, Art. 73: “the list of senators for a State”).
The Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] meet jointly as constitutionally or legally required or upon an accepted invitation. Co-legislative acts remain laws; joint and exclusive acts remain resolutions. The Cámara del Senado [Senate]’s presiding officer heads Congreso [Congress], assisted by the Cámara de Diputados [Chamber of Deputies]’ presiding officer as Vicepresidente del Congreso [Vice-President of Congress]. (Arts. 73–75; cont., 1931, Arts. 74–76).
Congreso [Congress] makes assigned elections and appointments, examines the presidential message and ministerial accounts, admits qualifying territories as Estados [States], and reviews Créditos Adicionales [additional appropriations] against supporting documents and constitutional procedure. It may consider the resignation of the Presidente de la República [president] or of the person exercising presidential functions. The approval clause in Art. 76(6) reads “con los trámites que esta Constitución establece”. (Art. 76; cf. 1931, Art. 77(2, 6): “consider the resignation of the Presidente de los Estados Unidos de Venezuela [President of the United States of Venezuela] […] within the indicated limits”).
The co-legislative Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] decree national taxes and loans, regulate debt and federal offices, enact the budget, provide territorial administration, adjust the deputy population base, legislate on pensions and the specified national matters, decree war, regulate armed-force recruitment and replacement, grant amnistías [amnesties], and legislate on ports and coasts. Art. 77(21) includes National Education, the Ejército Nacional [National Army] and Armada [Navy], and road traffic propelled mechanically or by animal power. (Art. 77(1–3, 9, 11–12, 14–15, 17, 19–22); cf. 1931, Art. 78(18): “Public Construction […] mechanically propelled vehicles”).
Congreso [Congress] examines whether statutory formalities were observed in taking the national census. It standardizes weights and measures under the metric decimal system. (Art. 77(8, 10); cf. 1931, Art. 78(10): “examine, and approve if it finds it duly conducted, the National Census”).
Treaties and international or diplomatic conventions require legislative approval before ratification or exchange; official publication follows both. Congreso [Congress] also approves or rejects national-interest contracts, including immigration and colonization contracts, except mining and public-land contracts or titles. (Art. 77(5–6); cf. 1931, Art. 78(6): “immigration and the other matters of national interest”).
Congreso [Congress] legislates to foster institutions of social solidarity and on civil aviation, and approves or rejects peace treaties negotiated by the executive. (Art. 77(13, 16, 18); cf. 1931, Arts. 15(4), 78(5, 14, 18): “Approve or reject treaties and diplomatic conventions”).
The Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] may appoint investigative commissions. National, state, and municipal administrative authorities and judicial authorities must provide the information and documents the commissions request. (Art. 78; new; 1931, Arts. 66, 78: no corresponding provision).
Bills originate with at least three members of either Chamber or the executive through the competent minister. Admission follows reading, with three debates separated by at least one day; the other Chamber follows the same process and returns an approved bill with its amendments. (Arts. 79–81; cont., 1931, Arts. 79–81).
If the originating Chamber does not accept amendments, it may insist on its text with written reasons; unresolved differences are debated jointly in Congreso [Congress] and decided by majority, with authority to agree on another formulation. (Art. 82; cf. 1931, Art. 82: “If the originating Chamber accepts the alterations”).
Rejected bills cannot be resubmitted until a later year. Bills pending at the close of ordinary sessions may continue in immediately following extraordinary sessions when the executive convokes them for that purpose. (Art. 83 and sole paragraph; cf. 1931, Arts. 83–84: “may not be discussed again except upon fresh presentation in the following year’s sessions or later”).
Only laws repeal laws. Reform may be total or partial; after partial reform the law must be printed in full with its modifications. (Art. 85; cf. 1931, Arts. 86–87: “the previous law shall be repealed in all its parts”).
The legislative formula names Congreso [Congress] followed by “Decrees”. Enacted texts are prepared in duplicate without alteration, signed by congressional officers, and sent for presidential and ministerial countersignature and publication. Laws take effect on their specified date or upon publication. Legislative power is not delegable. (Arts. 84, 86, 88–89; cont., 1931, Arts. 85, 88, 90–91).
An evident discrepancy between the original law and its printed version requires corrected republication in the Gaceta Oficial [Official Gazette]. (Art. 87; cf. 1931, Art. 89: “or the corresponding errata notice shall be inserted in it”).
The prohibition on retroactive legislation and the rules for immediate procedural application and favourable treatment of earlier evidence continue, subject to the express reservation of Art. 32. (Art. 90; cf. 1931, Art. 92: “No legislative provision shall have retroactive effect except when it imposes a lesser penalty.”).
ECO-HAC—Treasury
Taxation requires law; national expenditure requires a congressional budget appropriation or a previously decreed Crédito Adicional [additional appropriation]. Officials remain civilly liable for payments contrary to this rule. Congreso [Congress] controls national taxes, loans, debt, the budget, and the enumerated national fiscal matters. Expenditure outside the budget cannot be ordered by special law or resolution. (Arts. 15(11, 13, 17–18), 47, 77(1–3, 9), 77(21) (organization of the Hacienda Nacional [National Treasury]); cont., 1931, Arts. 15(12, 14, 17–18), 48, 78(1–3, 9), 78(18) (organization of the Hacienda Nacional [National Treasury])).
The currency provision prohibits banknotes not backed by the metallic cover or reserve prescribed by law, and maintains the gold standard. The prohibition uses the wording “podrá decretarse ni autorizarse la circulación de billetes de banco”. (Art. 77(4); cf. 1931, Art. 78(4): “in no case and for no reason may the compulsory circulation of banknotes be authorized”).
Exports are free subject to limitations required by public order or national interests; other customs matters are governed by national laws. Import and foreign-transit duties, together with the territorial tax while retained, accrue to the Tesoro Nacional [National Treasury]. (Art. 15(13); cf. 1931, Art. 15(14): “Exports are free and no tax may be established upon them.”).
Estados [States] retain ownership of saltworks, tierras baldías [public lands], their products, pearl fisheries, and mines in their jurisdiction, under federal administration. Saltworks remain inalienable, concessions temporary, and public-land sales, leases, and grants subject to statutory rules and occupant preference. Island tierras baldías [public lands] cannot be alienated directly or indirectly; the revenues accrue to the Tesoro Nacional [National Treasury]. (Art. 15(18); cont., 1931, Art. 15(18)).
The Situado Constitucional [Constitutional Allocation] equals twenty per cent of national revenue for the preceding calendar year, distributed by population among Estados [States], the Distrito Federal [Federal District], and Territorios Federales [Federal Territories]. State revenue includes stamped-paper taxes and other taxes and contributions established by their legislatures. (Art. 17(4); cf. 1931, Art. 17(4): “equivalent to twelve per cent of total revenue receipts”).
The restrictions on state customs, import, export, transit, federal, and municipal taxation and discrimination against outside products continue. Estados [States] cannot tax goods before consumption or impose personal-labour taxes or monetary equivalents. They may require fiscal data and reports from the federal administration, although they cannot require it to collect their taxes. No tax or contribution may be imposed on livestock on the hoof or its products or by-products. The collection clause names “administración fiscal federal”; the transit clause includes “ni las cosas, cualquiera que sea su procedencia, que pasen para otro Estado”. (Art. 17(4)(3)(a–f); cf. 1931, Art. 17(4)(3)(b, d): “whatever its provenance, passing to another State […] federal local administration”).
Agricultural, livestock, and edible-fish products may bear municipal retail-trade taxes, but neither special taxes nor unequal retail taxation. Municipal revenue remains subject to the stated restrictions; the Distrito Federal [Federal District]’s municipality determines its revenue system autonomously within those limits. Art. 18(3) cites “parágrafo 4, número 3 del Artículo 17”. (Arts. 6, 18(3); cf. 1931, Art. 18(3): “not to establish licence taxes on agriculture, livestock raising or fishing for edible fish […] paragraph 3, number 4 of Article 17”).
Estados [States] and Municipalidades [Municipalities] cannot borrow abroad. National, state, municipal, and other public-interest contracts cannot be transferred to foreign governments or made with companies not legally domiciled in Venezuela, and must submit unresolved disputes to Venezuelan courts without foreign claims. Art. 24 refers contracts made by Estados [States] and Municipalidades [Municipalities] to the printed “Artículo 4”; Art. 49 contains the public-interest contract provisions stated here. (Arts. 24, 49; cf. 1931, Art. 24: “Article 50”).
Congreso [Congress] must authorize disposal of immovables in the Nation’s private patrimony, under penalty of nullity. Public-land titles may cover gratuitous grants, sale, or lease. (Arts. 77(7), 100(33); cf. 1931, Arts. 78(7), 100(30): “Authorize the Executive Power to alienate immovable property belonging to the Nation.”).
Additional appropriations retain the requirements of insufficiency or unforeseen expenditure, available funds, and priority for ordinary expenditure. The use of the appropriation must be specified; Congreso [Congress] examines it with supporting documents. Art. 76(6) requires approval “con los trámites que esta Constitución establece”. (Arts. 76(6), 100(28); cf. 1931, Arts. 77(6), 100(31): “within the indicated limits […] without prejudice to ordinary expenditure, which shall take precedence over extraordinary expenditure”).
Within thirty days after the Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] assemble, the Ministro de Hacienda [Minister of Finance] presents the draft general revenue and expenditure budget, prepared in consultation with the other ministers and accompanied by an explanatory statement. Ministros del Despacho [Ministers] separately account for administered funds. Statutory pensions and retirement benefits continue to be funded through aggregate budget allocations. (Arts. 77(14), 109; cf. 1931, Arts. 78(13), 109: “shall present in due time to Congreso [Congress] each year”).
Art. 32(2) authorizes an extraordinary recovery to the Tesoro Nacional [National Treasury] from the property and estates of the listed senior federal officials for specified public and property offences, upon congressional decision and state ratification under the article. Art. 100(29) refers to the last paragraph of Art. 32(2) and to congressional authorization. (Arts. 32(2), 100(29); cf. 1931, Art. 36(2): “No confiscations of property shall be decreed or carried out, except solely as a measure of reprisals in international war”).
POW-EXE—Executive
Sovereignty resides in the people and is exercised through the public powers. An armed force or gathering claiming popular authority and petitioning in that capacity commits sedition or rebellion. Defined competence continues to limit public power, which is divided among federal, state, and municipal authorities and, federally, legislative, executive, and judicial branches. (Arts. 40–41, 50; cf. 1931, Arts. 40–41, 51: “Sovereignty resides in the people, who exercise it through the public powers.”).
Usurped authority is ineffective and its acts are null; decisions obtained by force or a subversive popular gathering are also null. The exercise of public power entails individual responsibility for excess of competence or breach of the governing law, and officials remain liable for other offences. (Arts. 42–43; cf. 1931, Arts. 42–44: “The law shall determine everything concerning the nullity of acts executed through excess of powers.”).
Federal administration not assigned elsewhere belongs to the Presidente de la República [president] in union with the ministers, who are his organs. Executive functions cannot be exercised outside the Distrito Federal [Federal District] except under the temporary-relocation and official-visit provisions of Art. 100(23–24). Administration operates through federal agents designated by law or the constitutive acts of official bodies, with constitutionally permitted state assistance. (Arts. 91–93; cf. 1931, Arts. 93–94: “is exercised by a Magistrate called Presidente de los Estados Unidos de Venezuela [President of the United States of Venezuela]”).
The Presidente de la República [president] must be Venezuelan by birth, have completed thirty years, be of estado seglar [lay status], and possess civil and political rights. (Art. 94; cf. 1931, Art. 95: “over thirty years of age, of status and in possession of all his civil and political rights”).
The presidential term is five years, with no re-election for the immediately following constitutional period. Ineligible for that period are also anyone who exercised the presidency throughout the last year of the preceding period and relatives of either person within the fourth degree of consanguinity or second of affinity. (Arts. 53, 95; cf. 1931, Art. 54: “shall last seven years”).
The Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] jointly elect the Presidente de la República [president] within the first fifteen days of each constitutional period, after at least five days’ notice published in the Gaceta Oficial [Official Gazette]. (Art. 96; cf. 1931, Art. 96: “Within the first fifteen days of its installation, in the year in which the respective period begins”).
The Presidente de la República [president] takes the oath before Congreso [Congress] or, if prevented, before the Corte Federal y de Casación [Court]. Until the elected successor takes office, the Presidente saliente [outgoing president] continues as Encargado del Poder Ejecutivo Federal [Acting Head of the Federal Executive]. If one month passes after congressional sessions close without the Presidente electo [elected president] taking the oath before the Corte Federal y de Casación [Court], a permanent vacancy is deemed to exist. The Presidente saliente [outgoing president] otherwise continues with the same powers and responsibilities. (Arts. 97, 103; cf. 1931, Arts. 103, 120(17): “shall deliver the Executive Power to the member of the Corte Federal y de Casación [Federal and Cassation Court] whom it designates”).
Temporary absences are filled by a designated minister. Congreso [Congress] elects a replacement for a permanent vacancy for the remainder of the period; extraordinary sessions must be summoned immediately when needed. Where the vacancy occurs after inauguration, the minister already acting, or one chosen by Gabinete [Cabinet] majority, serves until the replacement takes office. (Art. 98; cf. 1931, Art. 97: “If Congreso [Congress] is not assembled in ordinary sessions, it shall be summoned to extraordinary sessions”).
Presidential absence from the capital within the Republic does not constitute a temporary vacancy, and instructions may be sent to ministers for decisions issued in the capital. (Art. 99; cf. 1931, Art. 98: “He may also exercise, at any place in the Republic where he is located, power 4 of Article 100.”).
The Presidente de la República [president] appoints and removes ministers, directs war, receives foreign diplomatic ministers, and signs official letters to heads of state. He remains Comandante en Jefe del Ejército Nacional [Commander-in-Chief of the National Army]. (Arts. 44, 100(1, 3–5); cont., 1931, Arts. 45, 100(1, 3–5)).
The Presidente de la República [president] commands the Ejército Nacional [National Army] and Armada [Navy] personally or through appointees and fixes their strength. (Art. 100(2); cf. 1931, Art. 100(2): “Command the Ejército [Army], Aviación [Aviation] and Armada [Navy]”).
The Presidente de la República [president] exercises superior civil and political authority in the Distrito Federal [Federal District] through a freely appointed and removable governor, and administers Territorios Federales [Federal Territories] and Dependencias Federales [Federal Dependencies]. (Art. 100(6–7); cf. 1931, Art. 100(6–7): “Administer the Distrito Federal [Federal District] according to law”).
The Presidente de la República [president] may entrust the presidency temporarily to a minister and resume it during the term, retaining military command and direction of war under powers 2 and 3. For the acting minister, the recension prints “deberá ejercer de acuerdo con las atribuciones 1, 6, 7, 17, 18, 23, 25 y 26”. (Art. 100(9); cf. 1931, Art. 100(8): “the Ministro Encargado de la Presidencia [minister acting as president] must exercise in agreement with him powers 1, 6, 7, 19, 20, 25, 27 and 28”).
The Presidente de la República [president] issues the execution order and publishes the Constitution and laws, ensures their observance, and determines when a treaty-approving law receives its execution order, in accordance with international usage and foreign-relations considerations. Implementing regulations may be amended or replaced without altering the law’s spirit, purpose, or reason; the new regulation must be published in full with repeal of its predecessor. (Art. 100(8, 10–11); cf. 1931, Arts. 78(5), 100(9–10): “issue, in the Consejo de Ministros [Council of Ministers], decrees and regulations for better execution of the laws”).
With the prescribed ministerial or Gabinete [Cabinet] participation, the Presidente de la República [president] negotiates authorized loans, orders and submits the census, and creates and funds necessary public services during legislative recess, also suppressing or modifying existing services. He directs prosecutions through the Ministerio Público Federal [Federal Public Ministry], appoints and removes the relevant national officials, convenes Congreso [Congress] extraordinarily, declares war after congressional authorization, and administers national revenues. (Art. 100(12–19); cf. 1931, Art. 100(11, 13, 16–21): “the creation and funding of new public services necessary during the recess of the Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers]”).
Diplomatic negotiations are conducted through the Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores [Minister of Foreign Relations]; treaties are concluded through chosen plenipotentiaries with Council approval and submitted for legislative approval or rejection. Treaties retain the peaceful-settlement clause for disputes over interpretation or execution. Authorized national-interest contracts are concluded through ministers with Council approval and submitted to Congreso [Congress]. (Art. 100(20–21); cf. 1931, Art. 100(22–23): “conduct diplomatic negotiations personally or through the competent minister”).
The Presidente de la República [president] may prohibit foreign entry or order expulsion in cases permitted by international law, the Constitution, or national legislation. He may restrict or suspend guarantees under Art. 36 and exercise the listed wartime powers while the war lasts, including requesting and granting assistance to Estados [States], relocation, treason prosecutions, reorganization of rebel-held Estados [States], patentes de corso [letters of marque], and reprisals. (Art. 100(22–23); cf. 1931, Art. 100(24–25): “Request from the Estados [States] the assistance necessary for national defence or that of the institutions”).
Official visits with ministers relocate the executive seat and require regulation of routine administration in Caracas. The Presidente de la República [president] may end interstate armed conflict after good offices fail, exercise functions delegated by state constitutions, and grant indultos [pardons]. Art. 100(24) reads “el asiento del Poder Ejecutivo Federal será el sitio en donde se hallare el Presidente”; Art. 100(26) reads “las funciones que éstos le delegaren”. (Art. 100(24–27); cf. 1931, Art. 100(26, 28): “the Poder Ejecutivo Federal [Federal Executive Power] shall be the place where the Presidente [president] is located […] the actions which they delegate to him”).
The Presidente de la República [president] orders the issue, through the competent ministers, of navigation licences and nationality certificates. (Art. 100(31–32); cont., 1931, Art. 100(14–15)).
The Presidente de la República [president] directs measures under Art. 32(2), as authorized by Congreso [Congress], and the exclusion or expulsion measures under the last paragraph of Art. 32(6). Public-land titles include gratuitous grants, sale, or lease, alongside mining concessions. (Art. 100(29–30, 33); cf. 1931, Art. 100(24, 30): “Prohibit, when considered expedient, the entry of foreigners into national territory and expel them”).
The Presidente de la República [president] presents an annual account of administration and the Republic within the first ten days of ordinary sessions, personally or through a minister. In the final year it is presented on 19 April or, if the Cámaras Legislativas [Chambers] have not assembled, on their first meeting day. (Art. 101; cf. 1931, Art. 101 (final paragraph): “the Presidente saliente [outgoing president] shall leave it, signed, with the Encargado de la Presidencia [acting president]”).
The Presidente de la República [president] is jointly responsible with ministers for administrative acts, in addition to personal responsibility for treason and ordinary offences. (Art. 102; cf. 1931, Art. 102: “is responsible only for treason against the Nation and ordinary offences”).
The law determines ministers’ functions and departments. Presidential decrees require the competent ministerial countersignature under penalty of ineffectiveness, except the decree appointing the ministers themselves. The Distrito Federal [Federal District] governor remains the Presidente de la República [president]’s legal administrative organ there. (Arts. 104–105; cf. 1931, Art. 105: “except when he exercises powers 1 and 8 of Article 100”).
Ministros del Despacho [Ministers] must be Venezuelan by birth, over thirty, of estado seglar [lay status], and possess civil and political rights. The Presidente de la República [president] convenes the Council when the subject requires it or he considers it appropriate. Ministros del Despacho [Ministers] remain personally responsible despite presidential orders; joint responsibility for Gabinete [Cabinet] acts applies to ministers who voted affirmatively. Ministros del Despacho [Ministers] are subject to criminal and civil responsibility for unlawful acts. (Arts. 106–108, 111; cf. 1931, Arts. 106–108: “This responsibility is joint for all ministers in respect of presidential acts decided in Gabinete [Cabinet].”).
Ministros del Despacho [Ministers] submit annual documented reports and accounts within the first ten days of sessions and retain their right to speak and duty to attend when summoned. In the final year they present reports on 19 April or leave them with the Presidente de la Corte Federal y de Casación [president of the Federal and Cassation Court] for transmission to Congreso [Congress]. (Arts. 109–110; cf. 1931, Art. 109 (final paragraph): “with the Encargado de la Presidencia de la República [acting president of the Republic]”).
Holding more than one remunerated public office remains prohibited, with exceptions for inactive alternates and posts in academies, hospitals, incidental courts, and teaching or charitable institutions. Acceptance of a second paid office vacates the first. Foreign gifts, offices, honours, or rewards require Cámara del Senado [Senate] authorization; the law regulates national officials’ oaths. (Arts. 45, 48, 52; cf. 1931, Art. 46: “except as provided in the preceding Article”).
POW-JUD—Judiciary
Judicial power resides in the Corte Federal y de Casación [Federal and Cassation Court] and the other statutory courts. Federal judges are appointed for the constitutional period and removable only as the law permits. Judicial officials are responsible under law. (Arts. 118–120; cf. 1931, Arts. 116–117: “shall be appointed for a specified period”).
The Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] retains seven members, Venezuelan by birth, over thirty, and lawyers of the Republic, serving five years from the constitutional period beginning on 19 April 1936 and remaining until successors take office. Its divisions and their membership are governed by law. (Arts. 53, 121; cf. 1931, Arts. 54, 118: “shall serve for seven years”).
Congreso [Congress] elects Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] members individually by at least an absolute majority within fifteen days after assembling, and elects seven numbered alternates in the same sitting. Alternates fill permanent vacancies; the Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] provides for temporary and case-specific absences. Congreso [Congress] fills vacancies on the list of alternates, placing the newly appointed alternates last on that list; refusal to fill a vacancy is treated as a temporary or case-specific absence. (Art. 122; cf. 1931, Art. 119: “shall fill the permanent or temporary vacancies of the principal members”).
The Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] hears accusations against the Presidente de la República [president] or Encargado de la Presidencia [acting president], ministers, the Procurador General [Procurator General], the Distrito Federal [Federal District] governor, its members, Presidentes de los Estados [state presidents] and designated senior state officials, and governors of Territorios Federales [Federal Territories]. It retains the specified diplomatic, cassation, prize, intergovernmental, and competence jurisdiction. (Art. 123(1–8); cf. 1931, Art. 120(2): “against the Presidents of the Estados [States] and other senior officials of those Estados [States] designated by their laws”).
Constitutional review extends to municipal laws as well as national and state laws; nullity is limited to the conflicting provisions unless their connection requires invalidating the whole. The Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] resolves conflicts between laws and annuls acts violating state rights, autonomy, fiscal restrictions, or, generally, the Constitution, together with the specified usurpation and coercion acts under Art. 42. The fiscal reference in Art. 123(11) reads “parágrafo 4, número 4 del Artículo 17”. (Art. 123(9–11); cf. 1931, Art. 120(9, 11): “national laws or those of the Estados [States] […] paragraph 3, number 4 of Article 17”).
An action to annul an administrative act for illegality or abuse of power expires after thirteen months only if no constitutional principle, guarantee, or right has been violated. Illegality remains available as a defence. A ministerial resolution challenged as null requires the contentious procedure in the following provision. (Art. 123(11); cf. 1931, Art. 120(12): “expires thirteen months from the date of publication of that act”).
In contentious proceedings the Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] decides questions between the Nation and private persons arising from or in connection with federal contracts and mining or public-land concessions, except matters reserved by the applicable law to executive decision without judicial recourse. It gives foreign judgments enforceable effect when appropriate, hears damages and other monetary claims against the Nation, settles boundaries between federal entities, and performs other assigned federal functions. (Art. 123(12–16); cf. 1931, Art. 120(13): “between the Nation and contractors or concessionaires”).
The Presidente saliente [outgoing president] continues as Encargado del Poder Ejecutivo Federal [Acting Head of the Federal Executive] until the elected successor takes office. (Arts. 97, 103, 123; cf. 1931, Art. 120(17): “Designate on 19 April of the year in which each federal constitutional period begins the member of the same Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] who is to take charge of the Executive Power”).
For accusations within the first two enumerated judicial powers, the Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] decides whether grounds for proceedings exist; an affirmative decision suspends the official during trial. Ordinary crimes go to the competent ordinary court, while political crimes remain before the Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] through final judgment. The Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] submits an annual report and recommended legislative reforms. (Arts. 124–125; cont., 1931, Arts. 121–122).
The Ministerio Público Federal [Federal Public Ministry] remains the executive’s organ before the judiciary and state courts when necessary. (Art. 112; cont., 1931, Art. 111).
The Procurador General [Procurator General] must be Venezuelan by birth, of estado seglar [lay status], over thirty, a lawyer of the Republic, and possess civil and political rights. Congreso [Congress] appoints him within its first thirty days in the opening year of the constitutional period for the whole period, together with five numbered alternates of the same qualifications, called by the executive in election order. He has under his direction one or more lawyers of his free choice and the other employees of his office. (Arts. 113–115; cf. 1931, Arts. 112–113: “The Procurador General de la Nación [Procurator General of the Nation] is freely appointed and removed by the President”).
The Procurador General [Procurator General] ensures lawful adjudication in the specified criminal, fiscal, public-order, and morals cases; provides legal opinions to Congreso [Congress], the Presidente de la República [president], ministers, and the Corte Federal y de Casación [Court]; promotes accusations against federal officials on his own initiative or at executive request; acts as fiscal ministry in the specified judicial proceedings; and defends national rights in litigation under executive instructions. He and his substitutes are responsible on the same terms as ministers. (Arts. 116–117; cf. 1931, Art. 114(3): “at the request of the Ejecutivo Federal [Federal Executive]”).
Federal judicial competence includes the Corte Federal y de Casación [Court] under the Constitution and its organic law, ordinary courts in the Distrito Federal [Federal District], territories, and dependencies, and federal courts acting in the Estados [States] in the enumerated cases. The law may confer federal judicial functions on state courts in specified cases. (Art. 15(7); cf. 1931, Art. 15(7): “the ordinary courts in the Distrito Federal [Federal District] and in the Territorios Federales [Federal Territories]”).
POW-SUB—Subnational Government
The Estados [States] reciprocally recognize their autonomy and political equality and retain sovereignty not delegated in this Constitution. They must preserve national independence and integrity, cannot secede, seek foreign protection, or cede territory to foreign powers, and must defend the Federation. Federal and state government remains republican, federal, democratic, elective, representative, responsible, and alternating. (Arts. 12–13; cf. 1931, Art. 12: “retain in full the sovereignty not delegated”).
Municipalidades [Municipalities] enjoy full economic and administrative autonomy from federal and state political power, subject only to constitutional restrictions. The Distrito Federal [Federal District]’s municipality receives the same autonomy and may establish its revenue system within the constitutional limits. (Arts. 6, 14; cf. 1931, Art. 14: “in case of foreign or internal war the Executive Power of the State may also assume administration of the Districts”).
Estados [States] enact their constitutions and organic laws; Concejos Municipales [municipal councils] and Asambleas Legislativas [state legislatures] are selected under federal electoral laws, while deputies are elected under Art. 55. Estados [States] may retain or change their names. They elect their public authorities under their constitutions and laws and may delegate specified functions to the Presidente de la República [president] through their constitutions. State courts administer civil, commercial, and criminal justice except matters reserved federally, subject to statutory review by the Corte Federal y de Casación [Court]. (Art. 17(1–3); cf. 1931, Art. 17(1–2): “direct and secret voting […] in the Constitutions and Laws of those Estados [States] which so decide”).
Estados [States] organize their revenues, including the twenty-per-cent Situado Constitucional [Constitutional Allocation] and the other permitted taxes, subject to the restrictions detailed under ECO-HAC. They retain the other rights of autonomous entities reserved under Art. 12. (Art. 17(4); cf. 1931, Art. 17(5): “their category of economic entities”).
Municipal functions include police, supplies, cemeteries, ornamentation, civil architecture, lighting, waterworks, urban tramways, and other municipal services. Municipalidades [Municipalities] also organize vigilance and measures against illiteracy under federal instruction rules. Public-health services remain subject to federal law and inspection. Municipal common lands and other municipal lands are administered without alienation except for construction; municipal taxes follow Art. 18(3). (Art. 18; cf. 1931, Art. 18(1): “and the other services of a municipal character”).
Estados [States] must execute federal constitutional, legislative, and lawful administrative provisions within federal competence. Estados [States] and Municipalidades [Municipalities] recognize and execute other competent authorities’ public and judicial acts. They cannot permit recruitment directed against foreign peace, liberty, or independence or the Republic’s internal peace, wage war upon one another, or borrow abroad. Two or more Estados [States] may unite while retaining the liberty to recover their autonomy, with notice to the executive, Congreso [Congress], and the other Estados [States]. (Arts. 16, 19, 22–23, 24 (foreign borrowing), 25; cont., 1931, Arts. 16, 19, 22–25).
The federal government may maintain necessary federal officials and employees and Ejército Nacional [National Army] officers, soldiers, and employees in state territory. Their jurisdiction remains confined to their duties, without personal privilege; Estados [States] cannot impose duties incompatible with federal service. (Art. 20; cf. 1931, Art. 20: “the federal judges, the representatives or agents of the Ministerio Público Federal [Federal Public Ministry]”).
Public acts and official documents bear the calendar date and the years of Independence from 19 April 1810 and Federation from 20 February 1859. Dependencias Federales [Federal Dependencies] are included among the entities named. (Art. 26; cf. 1931, Art. 26: “of the Distrito Federal [Federal District], Territorios Federales [Federal Territories], Municipalidades [Municipalities]”).
Federal competence also includes international relations, national symbols and honours, protection of national interests and public peace, weights and measures, supervision of national law, and the organization of the Distrito Federal [Federal District], territories, and dependencies. Estados [States] and Municipalidades [Municipalities] cannot conduct political or diplomatic relations with foreign nations. Other matters assigned by the Constitution to a federal power also fall within federal competence. (Art. 15(1–3, 5–6, 15, 20); cont., 1931, Art. 15(1–3, 5–6, 11, 20)).
CON-AMD—Amending the Constitution
Total or partial reform is declared by Congreso [Congress] in ordinary sessions upon requests from three-quarters of the Asambleas Legislativas de los Estados [state Legislative Assemblies] meeting ordinarily, and only on points supported by a majority of Estados [States]. Amendments follow the legislative enactment procedure and are submitted to the state assemblies for ratification. (Arts. 126–128; cont., 1931, Arts. 123–125).
Either Chamber may initiate total or partial reform; ratification requires two-thirds of the Asambleas Legislativas de los Estados [state Legislative Assemblies] in ordinary sessions. State votes return to Congreso [Congress] for scrutiny. Once scrutiny establishes lawful ratification, the amended Constitution takes effect upon publication in the Gaceta Oficial [Official Gazette]. (Arts. 129–131; cf. 1931, Arts. 126–127: “upon ratification by two-thirds of the Asambleas Legislativas [Legislative Assemblies] of the Estados [States]”).
CIV-SUF—Suffrage
Electors and persons eligible for office are Venezuelan males over twenty-one who can read and write and are not under interdiction or a criminal sentence carrying political disqualification, subject to constitutional restrictions and statutory qualifications for particular offices. (Art. 32(14); cf. 1931, Art. 32(12): “all Venezuelans over twenty-one years of age”).
Federal law governs elections. Municipal councils and Asambleas Legislativas [state legislatures] are selected under federal electoral legislation; assemblies of Municipalidades [Municipalities] elect congressional deputies, while Asambleas Legislativas [state legislatures] elect senators from outside their membership. Diputados [Deputies] must have completed twenty-five years and senators must be over thirty; both offices acquire the stated native-origin or three-year residence requirement. (Arts. 15(4), 17(1), 54–57, 59–60; cf. 1931, Arts. 17(1), 56–58, 60–61: “direct and secret voting”).
Congreso [Congress] elects the Presidente de la República [president] and the members of the Corte Federal y de Casación [Court]. (Arts. 96, 122; cont., 1931, Arts. 96, 119).
Congreso [Congress] also elects the Procurador General [Procurator General] and five alternates for the constitutional period. (Art. 114; cf. 1931, Art. 113: “is freely appointed and removed by the President”).
CIV-CIT—Citizenship
Venezuelan nationality is held by birth or acquired by naturalización [naturalization]. Birth nationality covers all persons born in the Republic and children of Venezuelan parents wherever born. Naturalization continues to include adult children born abroad of a naturalized Venezuelan father or mother who establish domicile in Venezuela and declare their intention to be Venezuelan and persons obtaining certificates under law. (Arts. 27–29(1, 3); cont., 1931, Arts. 27–29(1, 3)).
Persons born in Spain or the Ibero-American republics may acquire nationality after residence, declaration of intention, and compliance with the applicable law. A foreign woman married to a Venezuelan is Venezuelan during marriage; continuation after dissolution requires a declaration within the following year and its acceptance. (Art. 29(2, 4); cf. 1931, Art. 29(2, 4): “Those born or to be born in the Ibero-American republics”).
The principal registrar records declarations and forwards them with the requisite documents for executive examination and publication if conforming to law. Declarations made abroad pass through diplomatic or consular representatives to the Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores [Minister of Foreign Relations] for registration and publication. Nationality is not acquired before publication. (Art. 30; cf. 1931, Art. 30: “shall send a copy of them to the Ejecutivo Federal [Federal Executive] for publication”).
Venezuelans must defend the Nation and obey its Constitution, laws, and lawful public orders; undertaking service against Venezuela is punishable as treason. Foreigners’ rights and duties are determined by law and cannot exceed those of Venezuelans. Nationals and foreigners cannot claim public compensation for losses not caused by legitimate authorities acting officially. (Arts. 31, 37, 39; cont., 1931, Arts. 31, 37, 39).
Foreigners, whether domiciled or not, who take part in Venezuelan political contests or activities incur the same responsibilities as Venezuelans and may be detained, confined, or expelled. (Art. 38; cf. 1931, Art. 38: “who take part in Venezuelan political contests”).
RTS-GAR—Rights
Life is inviolable, and the death penalty cannot be established or applied. (Art. 32(1); cont., 1931, Art. 32(1)).
Property is inviolable, subject to lawful contributions and expropriation for public or social utility through juicio contradictorio [adversarial proceedings] and prior compensation. Owners must observe public-health, forest-and-water conservation, and comparable community obligations. Law may restrict acquisition or transfer of specified property in the national interest. The Nation favours small and medium rural property and may expropriate unused private lands, with legal process and prior compensation, for division or alienation under law. (Art. 32(2); cf. 1931, Art. 32(2): “to be taken for works of public utility, through juicio contradictorio [adversarial proceedings] and prior compensation”).
Confiscation remains prohibited except for reciprocal reprisals against enemy nationals in international war and the extraordinary recovery of public funds. The latter applies to presidents of the Republic, ministers, and governors of the Distrito Federal [Federal District] and Territorios Federales [Federal Territories] who, in Congreso [Congress]’s judgment, committed offences against public affairs and property. Congreso [Congress] decides by absolute majority in ordinary or extraordinary sessions, with approval by two-thirds of the Asambleas Legislativas de los Estados [state Legislative Assemblies] in the same manner. (Art. 32(2); cf. 1931, Art. 36(2): “except solely as measures of reprisals in international war”).
Extraordinary recovery encompasses the official’s entire property and estate under a special law and applies retroactively to the listed officials who served during the two preceding presidential periods. Private claims against the affected person or estate are met from a prudential share fixed by Congreso [Congress] and determined under the special statutory procedure. State legislatures may incorporate this measure into their constitutions for Presidentes de los Estados [state presidents] and secretaries general. (Art. 32(2); new; 1931, Arts. 32(2), 36(2), 92: no corresponding provision).
Correspondence in all its forms and private papers are inviolable; judicial seizure requires legal formalities and preservation of private matters unrelated to the case. Merchants’ and industrialists’ books and documents are subject to statutory or regulatory inspection and fiscal supervision. (Art. 32(3); cf. 1931, Art. 32(3): “postal and telegraphic correspondence and the other private papers”).
The home is inviolable except for prevention of offences, execution of lawful judicial decisions, and statutory sanitary visits. Personal liberty abolishes forcible military recruitment, with service governed by law; it prohibits slavery permanently, frees enslaved persons entering the Republic, and protects conduct not harmful to others within the law. (Art. 32(4–5); cont., 1931, Art. 32(4–5)).
Expression through speech, writing, print, and other publicity is protected subject to the listed offences, including outrage. Anonymity, war propaganda, and propaganda directed against the political or social order are prohibited. Communist and anarchist doctrines are declared contrary to independence, the political form, and social peace; persons proclaiming, propagating, or practising them are classified as traitors and punished under law. (Art. 32(6); cf. 1931, Art. 32(6): “Communist propaganda is also prohibited.”).
Whether or not guarantees are suspended, the Ejecutivo Federal [federal executive] may prevent entry or expel persons affiliated with those doctrines when it considers their presence dangerous or prejudicial to public order or social tranquillity. The period is six months to one year for nationals and indefinite for foreigners. Art. 35 includes these measures in its exception to punishment for official violations of guarantees. (Arts. 32(6), 35, 100(30); cf. 1931, Arts. 35–36: “in the cases provided for in the following Article”).
Movement, change of domicile, departure, and return are subject to legal formalities; bringing property into or out of the country is subject to public-order and national-interest limitations. (Art. 32(7); cf. 1931, Art. 32(7): “the liberty to travel without a passport”).
Work and industry remain free, with monopolies prohibited and statutory privilegios temporales [temporary privileges] for intellectual property, inventions, trademarks, and the enumerated transport, hydraulic-power, and communications enterprises at concessionaires’ expense, without public subsidies or guaranteed returns. Public interest and good morals limit work and industry; federal power may tax specified commodities and reserve industries to secure public services, national defence, and national credit. Professions requiring a title cannot be practised without it and the prescribed formalities. (Art. 32(8–10); cf. 1931, Art. 32(8): “subject to the prohibitions and limitations required by public order and good morals”).
Labour legislation must provide special protection to workers, improve their physical, moral, and intellectual condition, and regulate urban and rural employment with regard to social protection and national economic interests. A Consejo de Economía Nacional [National Economy Council] represents producers, consumers, capital, labour, and the liberal professions, with organization and functions determined by the executive. Weekly rest, preferably on Sundays, and paid annual holidays apply without distinction between manual, intellectual, and technical work; the Nation promotes workers’ technical education. (Art. 32(8); cf. 1931, Arts. 15(4), 32(8): “the freedom of work and industries”).
The Nation promotes European immigration and agricultural colonies in cooperation with Estados [States] and Municipalidades [Municipalities]. Agricultural work receives special executive regulation; the State seeks to establish labourers in the countryside, provide rural education, and ensure Venezuelan workers’ preference in colonization and use of national lands. It favours employee and worker participation in enterprise profits and promotes their savings. (Art. 32(8); cf. 1931, Art. 15(4): “immigration”).
Unarmed public or private assembly is protected when it does not compromise public order, and its exercise is regulated by law. Association remains subject to statutory restrictions and prohibitions. Petitioners retain a right to timely response and citizens may accuse officials before competent courts. (Art. 32(11–13); cf. 1931, Art. 32(9): “the freedom of assembly without arms, publicly or privately”).
Teaching remains free. Children’s moral and civic education is compulsory, directed towards national advancement and human solidarity. Every locality with a school population of at least thirty pupils must have at least one school. (Art. 32(15); cf. 1931, Art. 32(13): “the freedom of teaching”).
Individual security continues to prohibit imprisonment for non-criminal debt, special tribunals, unlawful detention, incommunicado detention, and compelled self-incrimination. The natural-judge and pre-existing-law rule reserves Art. 32(2). A preliminary investigation may not exceed thirty days after detention. The protected relatives within the stated degrees are retained, and the spouse is included. (Art. 32(17)(a–e); cf. 1931, Art. 32(15)(e): “nor against his ascendants, his relatives within the fourth degree of consanguinity or second of affinity”).
Detention must cease when its grounds have been removed by final judicial decision or lawful sufficient bail is given. Criminal punishment requires personal notice and a hearing; penalties restricting liberty cannot exceed twenty years, and infamous or perpetual penalties are prohibited. (Art. 32(17)(f–h); cont., 1931, Art. 32(15)(f–h)).
No person may be tried again for the same punishable acts that occasioned previous proceedings. Political detention must cease when order is restored, except in execution of a sentence already imposed. (Art. 32(17)(i–j); cf. 1931, Art. 32(15)(i): “nor be tried a second time for the same punishable act”).
Equality continues to require common laws, equal protection, duties, and contributions, with only statutory exemptions; hereditary distinctions, nobility titles, and remuneration extending beyond service remain prohibited. Official address remains citizen and usted, subject to diplomatic usage. Unenumerated rights are preserved. Federal and state laws, state constitutions, municipal ordinances, and regulations impairing guarantees are null, as declared by the Corte Federal y de Casación [Court]. (Arts. 32(18), 33–34; cf. 1931, Art. 34: “nor municipal ordinances”).
The Presidente de la República [president] in the Consejo de Ministros [Council of Ministers] may restrict or suspend guarantees in war, danger of war, epidemic, public calamity, or other circumstances requiring defence of national peace, security, institutions, or form of government. The decree must state its reasons, affected guarantees, and territorial extent and be repealed when its causes cease. Life, the prohibition of slavery, and protection against infamous penalties remain excepted; public institutions continue functioning and their members retain legal prerogatives. (Art. 36; cf. 1931, Art. 36: “or there exists imminent danger that either may occur”).
Persons opposed to restoration or preservation of peace may be arrested, confined, or expelled; those measures cease with their causes, except for the stated discretion concerning foreign expulsions. (Art. 36 (final paragraph); cf. 1931, Art. 36(3): “which the Ejecutivo Federal [Federal Executive] may decline to reverse if it does not consider it expedient”).
REG-MIL—The Military
Ejército [Army], Armada [Navy], and Aviación Militar [Military Aviation] remain federal matters; Estados [States] and Municipalidades [Municipalities] may maintain only police and prison guards unless otherwise federally ordered. Population-based contingents serve under the Ley de Servicio Militar Obligatorio [Law of Compulsory Military Service]; citizen militias and voluntary enlistees may form part of the Ejército Nacional [National Army] under law. War materiel in or entering the country belongs to the Nation. Forcible recruitment remains prohibited under the personal-liberty guarantee, with service governed by law. (Arts. 15(8), 32(5)(a); cf. 1931, Art. 15(8): “The law shall regulate the formation of citizen militias”).
Civil and military authority cannot be combined in one official except the Presidente de la República [president], who remains Comandante en Jefe del Ejército Nacional [Commander-in-Chief of the National Army]. The Presidente de la República [president] commands the Ejército [Army] and Armada [Navy] and fixes their strength, personally or through appointees, and directs war. (Arts. 44, 100(2–3); cf. 1931, Art. 45: “or in case of war, when military functions are assigned to a civil employee according to law”).
The armed forces remain non-deliberative, passive, and obedient and must request assistance through civil authorities under law. Troops remain quartered on voting days, with an exception for public-order assignments; offending commanders are punishable. (Art. 46; cf. 1931, Art. 47: “During electoral periods the troops shall remain quartered.”).
Estados [States] cannot permit recruitment directed against foreign independence or internal peace and cannot wage war upon one another. The Cámara del Senado [Senate] consents to promotions from Coronel [Colonel] and Capitán de Navío [Naval Captain]; Congreso [Congress] decrees war and legislates on military recruitment and replacement, retirement benefits, ports, and coasts. The executive declares war after the congressional decree and exercises constitutionally specified wartime powers. The legislative list in Art. 77(21) names “Ejército y Armada Nacionales”. (Arts. 22–23, 61(3), 77(14–15, 17, 20–21), 100(18, 23); cf. 1931, Art. 78(18): “Legislate concerning the Electoral Register, Public Construction, organization of the Hacienda Nacional [National Treasury], air, maritime, and river navigation, docks, post, telegraphs, wireless communications, railways, national roads and traffic upon them by mechanically propelled vehicles, tierras baldías [ungranted public lands], saltworks, pearl fisheries, and mines”).
A Presidente de la República [president] temporarily entrusting the presidency to a minister retains military command and direction of war. The acting-minister clause is recorded under POW-EXE, Art. 100(9). (Art. 100(9); cont., 1931, Art. 100(8)).
REG-REL—Religion
Religious freedom remains subject to supreme executive inspection of worship under law, preserving the Republic’s Patronato Eclesiástico [ecclesiastical patronage]. (Art. 32(16); cont., 1931, Art. 32(14)).
The Republic exercises Patronato Eclesiástico [ecclesiastical patronage] under the Law of 28 July 1824. Lay status is explicit among the qualifications of the Presidente de la República [president], ministers, and Procurador General [Procurator General]. (Arts. 51, 94(3), 106, 113; cf. 1931, Arts. 52, 95, 106, 112–113: “the law of 28 July 1928”).
ECO-INF—Infrastructure
Federal legislative competence encompasses the listed civil, commercial, criminal, procedural, banking, credit, social-provision, health, conservation, labour, intellectual-property, registration, expropriation, immigration, and nationality matters. Elections, veterinary health, agriculture and livestock development, and exploitation of natural resources are listed within that enumeration. (Art. 15(4); cf. 1931, Art. 15(4): “social provision, public health, conservation and development of forests, waters and the other natural riches of the country”).
Federal law governs public instruction; elementary primary instruction is compulsory and instruction in official institutes free. Federal competence includes the census and statistics under law; population-based official acts use the latest congressionally approved census. The census is conducted at statutory intervals. (Art. 15(9–10); cf. 1931, Art. 15(9): “Primary instruction is compulsory”).
Federal competence includes terrestrial transport and air, maritime, river, and lake navigation, together with docks and landing works. Taxes or privileges cannot restrict navigation on waterways that required no special works. Postal, telegraph, telephone, and wireless communications remain federal matters. (Art. 15(12, 14); cf. 1931, Art. 15(13): “everything concerning air, maritime and river navigation”).
National roads are those crossing the boundaries of a State, the Distrito Federal [Federal District], or a Territorio Federal [Federal Territory]; federal competence also covers aerial haulage cables and railways even within a State. Urban tramways and haulage cables remain municipal matters. Necessary federal public works do not limit state or municipal works. Federal works in state territory include aerodromes alongside forts, docks, warehouses, shipyards, penitentiaries, and quarantine stations. (Arts. 15(16, 19), 21; cf. 1931, Arts. 15(16), 21: “forts, docks, warehouses, shipyards, penitentiaries, quarantine stations”).
Congreso [Congress] approves the specified railway, aerial-cable, communications, immigration, colonization, and national-interest contracts, except mining and public-land contracts or titles. It legislates on civil aviation and the enumerated national transport, communications, resource, and education matters, including road traffic propelled mechanically or by animal power. Temporary privileges for concession-financed enterprises include hydraulic power. (Arts. 32(8), 77(6, 18, 21); cf. 1931, Arts. 32(8), 78(6, 18): “mechanically propelled vehicles”).
Public-interest contracts cannot be transferred to foreign governments or concluded with or transferred to companies not legally domiciled in Venezuela; unresolved disputes belong to competent Venezuelan courts under national law, without foreign claims. (Art. 49; cont., 1931, Art. 50).
CON-FIN—Final Provisions
Public offices whose duration exceeded five years under the Constitution of 9 July 1931 are reduced to five years counted from 19 April 1936. The presidential and judicial periods are five years; the legislative renewal is governed separately by Art. 54. (Arts. 53–54, 132; cf. 1931, Art. 54: “shall last seven years”).
Upon promulgation Congreso [Congress] makes the first appointment of the Procurador General [Procurator General] and his alternates under the new arrangement, for the constitutional period. (Art. 133; cf. 1931, Art. 113: “The Procurador General de la Nación [Procurator General of the Nation] is freely appointed and removed by the President”).
The Constitution issued on 7 July 1931, ordered complied with and published on 9 July 1931, is repealed. The 1936 agreement and constitutional closing bear 16 July; the execution formula bears 20 July and President Eleazar López Contreras’s signature. Art. 131 makes the lawfully ratified amended Constitution effective upon official publication. (Arts. 131, 134; prefatory agreement, closing and execution formulas; cf. 1931, Art. 131: “The Constitution drafted on 29 May 1929 is repealed”).
Sanctioning Agreement
The agreement records the following ratification counts for the proposed amendments and additions. The article numbers in this table identify the proposals enumerated in the agreement.Proposed articleRatifying state Legislative Assemblies518171418 (addition)1333143518371854185514561657186118761896189918101181301813318All other proposed amendments and additions19 of 20
The third consideration calls the Art. 18 proposal “la adición propuesta”. Operative Art. 1 declares the Constitution sanctioned with the proposed amendments and additions except “la enmienda contenida en el Artículo 18 propuesto”, which it orders suppressed. It declares the request of the Asamblea Legislativa [Legislative Assembly] of Zamora concerning Art. 4 inadmissible because it was not among the amendments and additions submitted. The agreement does not reproduce the wording of the suppressed proposal. (CIDEP 1936, p. 3, considerations and agreement, Art. 1).
Recension
Centro para la Integración y el Derecho Público [Centre for Integration and Public Law] (CIDEP).
Ricardo F. Morín Warrior at Rest Linoleum block print Approximately 8¾″ high × 12″ wide 1975
I had heard Nightbirde’s words before: “You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be happy.” Today they moved me with a force I could not remember from the first hearing. Had I felt it then? Would I feel it as strongly again? I could answer neither question. Yet I wanted to keep those words somewhere within reach. (parade.com)
A sentence can remain in memory while the feeling it awakened becomes difficult to recover. I can repeat the words, understand their meaning, and assent to them. Whether they will sustain me when I need them is another matter. The wish to preserve them arises partly from that uncertainty. Something has reached me, and I would like to be able to return to it.
The remark brings happiness into the present, where so much remains unresolved. If I make happiness depend upon relief from every difficulty, I entrust it to circumstances whose course I cannot determine. There will always be reasons to wait. Even the expectation of improvement can absorb the attention through which something pleasurable might become available now.
Yet the word “decide” gives me pause. I know how little command a person may have over what can be felt. Suffering can exhaust the very capacity through which pleasure is received. A sentence that sustains me today cannot establish what I should have been able to feel yesterday, or what anyone else ought to feel under the weight of a different life. Its force belongs to this encounter.
Perhaps that is why I hesitate to call what happened resilience. The name suggests a capacity I might possess and call upon again. What I experienced carries no such assurance. I heard familiar words and felt a possibility become immediate. I want that possibility to accompany me, including through moments when I may have difficulty recognizing it.
Writing this down preserves something of the encounter. It records that the words reached me again, that familiarity had left room for an intensity I did not anticipate. A later reading may disclose something quieter, or something I cannot foresee from here. I would like to leave room for that as well.
Will I feel it as strongly next time? I still do not know. I hope the words will be there when I reach for them, and that I will remain able to receive whatever they may offer then.
Ricardo F. Morín Triangulation Series Nº 7 37″ x 60″ x 2″ Oil on linen 2006
An elderly man stands beside a piece of luggage near the edge of a wide sidewalk at a public bus stop. A younger man notices him from a distance, and as he approaches, his attention remains fixed upon the older man rather than upon the bus stop itself. The older man perceives the stare as calculating, purposeful, and determined. There is room to pass. Instead, he changes course and strikes the older man with enough force to displace him from his position, then continues walking without explanation or apology. No dispute precedes the contact, and no serious injury follows.
The change of course makes the contact appear directed, though the encounter reveals little of what prompted it. Contempt, irritation, resentment, or the wish to impose upon someone may be imagined. None becomes certain merely because it would make the action intelligible. The younger man’s attention can be followed as far as the contact; his motive cannot be followed with the same assurance.
The older man was noticed before he was struck. Whatever the younger man perceived was sufficient to direct an approach, yet being noticed does not establish how much of a person has been acknowledged. Attention may be exact about where an act will arrive while remaining indifferent to the life upon which it intrudes.
Ordinarily, one passes a stranger without requiring an account of his presence. The man waiting beside his luggage need not explain where he is going or why he has stopped there. Almost nothing about him has to become known for the simple accommodation of passing without contact to occur.
Someone who would make that accommodation elsewhere may withhold it from a person expected to offer little resistance or to impose no consequence. Restraint weakens selectively, and another’s vulnerability can become an opportunity to act. Whether age or an expectation of impunity influenced the younger man’s choice remains unknown. Even if resentment were established, the question would remain why it found this particular recipient who is a total stranger.
The younger man had only to pass. Those charged with protecting a population face circumstances in which leaving the source of danger undisturbed may expose others to further injury. They may have to use force, and those awaiting their decision may have urgent reasons to demand it.
A government defending its territory, one invading another country, and one acting upon a danger it anticipates do not confront the same circumstances or bear the same responsibility. The suffering that follows cannot erase responsibility for how a war began. Neither can responsibility for its beginning settle every judgment concerning its subsequent conduct.
Those making the next decision must confront what remains dangerous, what has changed, and what another action could accomplish. People still exposed to attack may require defense long after the initial injury, while a brief operation may inflict harm for which no adequate ground ever existed. Neither the duration of a war nor the depth of the loss already suffered can settle what should happen next.
For those who have endured an attack, however, the first injury may remain more immediate than the changing circumstances through which a response proceeds. A danger recedes, an objective is reached, or further action creates risks absent at the beginning, while what happened continues to demand an answer. Asked what another strike would accomplish, a leader can return to the losses already sustained. The answer may be entirely sincere and still leave the question unanswered.
Grief may preserve a fidelity to the dead that no change in circumstances can satisfy. Political action nevertheless proceeds among the living. The demand that a loss receive an answer can persist after a particular response has ceased to serve the protection for which it was undertaken. At that point, reconsideration may be experienced as disloyalty even when the conditions of protection require it.
Those who receive the force may meanwhile become known chiefly through where they live or the people with whom they are associated. The person who directed an attack, the person who supported it, and the person who happened to live where it originated can be brought within the same field of action, though they do not bear the same responsibility. No one need deny that each has a history or a capacity to suffer. Those facts can be acknowledged and then set aside as having no bearing upon what is to be done.
The people exposed to an operation may be known to those directing it only through briefings, surveillance, casualty reports, and the observations passed through a chain of command. These can disclose what those deciding cannot see for themselves. Through a report, someone far from danger may learn what those enduring it have no means of bringing before him themselves. The distance between them can be reduced by the very procedures through which the decision is made.
Yet the reports may continue to arrive after the decision to proceed has ceased to admit reconsideration. Someone can register a loss accurately and still receive it only as something to be entered before the next authorization. The people affected remain visible in the record, while what becomes known about them is denied any bearing upon continuation. The information has arrived; the grounds of action have been protected from it.
Someone entrusted with the safety of others may knowingly cause harm while believing that refusing to act would cause more. The conflict may be real, and a clearer account of the consequences may not resolve it. But when those acting become certain that their responsibility supplies its own justification, the people who will bear the harm can appear only as a cost already accepted. Those who question the harm may then be treated as though they were opposing the protection itself.
An official may possess the authority to order an action and the means to carry it through, while those who will bear its consequences have little power to contest either. He can make the decision prevail without answering what he owes them. The question of justice remains, even when he acts with a sincere intention to protect others.
The older man was close enough to be deliberately approached. A distant population may be described in exhaustive detail. Neither proximity nor information establishes how another’s presence has entered a decision. Attention may narrow to what facilitates an act; an understanding of the suffering it will cause may also remain clear while the act proceeds. The failure can occur within attention itself.
A person may understand an injury, condemn its infliction, and nevertheless permit a comparable injury against someone placed outside the protection of that judgment. What is understood remains intact while its reach contracts. An account of the person’s fear, grievance, or conviction may make his conduct more intelligible without resolving how he accommodates what he condemns.
The younger man continues on his way without explaining himself. The absence of an explanation leaves a question about him; it does not make the force of the encounter disappear. What prompted him might become clearer if more were known, but he owed the older man the ordinary restraint that would have left him standing where he was.
The other remains someone whose life exceeds the terms under which he has been encountered. Grievance, threat, procedure, and necessity can each restrict what is permitted to matter about him. The person has not become fully known. The decision to act as though nothing further about him could matter may nevertheless already have been made.
Ricardo F. Morín October 6. 2026 Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania
Author’s Note: The conditions described here were examined earlier, through the structure of language rather than through particular encounters, in “The Grammar of Conflict”.
Ricardo F. Morín Untitled, 2005 Charcoal and black Sharpie pen 24 × 18 inches
Developers, governments, and those affected by artificial intelligence assign different significance to the same technical achievement. A developer seeking commercial advantage may treat an advance as grounds for ownership. A government concerned with strategic predominance may treat it as an instrument of national power. Those exposed to its consequences may judge it through its effects upon employment, education, communication, or public judgment. Each perspective depends upon relations that the achievement alone does not disclose.
These relations participate in development itself. Investors influence which problems receive attention. Owners determine who may use a capability and under what conditions. Governments establish permissions, restrictions, and incentives. The technology available to a user embodies decisions whose purposes need not be evident in its operation.
An answer appears on a screen. Its fluency may lead the user to accept it as sufficient for understanding. Yet the answer alone does not disclose how developers trained the system, which sources informed its response, what restrictions govern its output, or how developers organize its presentation to invite confidence. The user may find the answer useful without knowing all these conditions. That usefulness does not establish the adequacy of the answer.
Mediation names this dependence: understanding rests upon relations that attention to its immediate object does not necessarily reveal. The answer occupies the user’s attention. The conditions supporting its production, presentation, and acceptance remain only partially visible.
The public accounts of artificial intelligence exhibit a comparable dependence. Commercial accounts identify innovation through investment, demand, and return. Strategic accounts identify technological capacity through advantage over competitors. Security accounts identify uses through the dangers they introduce or prevent. Each account directs attention toward relations relevant to its purpose. Each leaves questions that its governing purpose cannot adequately answer.
These accounts also inform decisions. An institution that measures achievement through commercial return has grounds to favor applications for which customers will pay. A government that measures achievement through strategic advantage has grounds to favor capabilities that strengthen its position. The criteria through which an institution recognizes value therefore bear upon the purposes it authorizes and the resources it assigns. What remains outside those criteria may lack an effective claim upon its decisions.
Those who determine the terms of recognition can influence which needs count as reasons for action. Their authority does not follow from the completeness of their account. It may rest upon ownership, financial resources, statutory powers, or control over infrastructure. An account can govern development and can still leave much of its social significance unexamined.
The United States’ 2025 AI Action Plan explicitly frames development as a race for global dominance, and links technological leadership with economic and military advantage. The United Nations’ Global Digital Compact places international governance within a commitment to public benefit and inclusive participation. The former sets out actions for federal agencies; the latter records commitments among participating states. The purposes expressed in these documents operate through different institutional means. Their coexistence supplies no common authority for deciding between them when their demands conflict. [1]
Commercial success establishes that a product attracts expenditure. It does not establish how its benefits and burdens are distributed. National predominance establishes an advantage relative to other powers. It does not establish that the advantage improves the circumstances of those subject to its consequences. Protection against malicious use addresses a necessary concern. Authorized uses may also diminish the ability of people to understand, question, or influence decisions affecting them.
The capacities under development nevertheless permit achievements of substantial human value. Researchers can incorporate particular capabilities into successive stages of inquiry, and use them to examine complex relations, formulate hypotheses, and assist the design of inventions. Particular applications may support advances in medicine, materials, or other fields concerned with human welfare. The value of an achievement depends upon what it enables people to do and upon the consequences of its use. Commercial ownership or strategic sponsorship does not exhaust that value.
The same capacity to assist inquiry introduces uncertainty when institutions delegate decisions and actions to systems. Developers and users may permit a system to select means, initiate operations, or act upon other systems with limited intervention. Its effects then depend upon the scope of that permission, the conditions governing its operation, and the ability of those responsible to inspect or interrupt its actions.
Agency in these circumstances need not resemble human intention to exert power over human affairs. A system can influence conduct through recommendations that institutions routinely accept, classifications upon which access depends, or operations carried out under delegated authority. Uncertainty concerns how its actions will interact with circumstances its designers and users cannot fully anticipate, and how effectively human beings can retain control over those interactions.
The system may also influence the relations through which people understand and authorize its use. If an institution relies upon it to identify priorities, assess evidence, or evaluate performance, its outputs inform decisions about subsequent delegation. Authority initially granted by human beings can therefore support operations that shape the grounds upon which further authority is granted. The institution’s reliance upon the system extends beyond the performance of a task to the judgment of what tasks deserve performance and under whose direction.
Incremental benefit and uncertainty about agency can coexist within the same arrangement. An invention may improve human welfare, and may increase reliance upon systems that those affected cannot readily examine or contest. That reliance may rest upon cost, infrastructure, contractual restrictions, or the absence of practicable alternatives. Limited understanding can impede scrutiny of the arrangement without constituting its sole cause. The achievement retains its value. That value supplies no sufficient account of the reliance established through its use.
The betterment of society consequently depends upon more than the intentions of those directing development. If those institutions retain exclusive authority to define improvement, their criteria govern which consequences receive recognition. A gain in productivity may accompany diminished security of employment. Greater access to information may accompany greater reliance upon a small number of providers. Expanded capabilities may leave those affected with fewer means of challenging their application.
Who receives the benefit, who bears the burden, and who possesses authority to decide are distinct questions. An assessment confined to aggregate improvement can conceal the differences upon which its judgment rests.
The global reach of artificial intelligence extends those differences across societies. Worldwide availability does not establish worldwide participation in determining its purposes. A community may receive a system without the resources to adapt it to its language, examine its limitations, or challenge its terms of use. Providers extend access while they retain control over the conditions of participation. The technology serves a wider population without a corresponding distribution of authority over its development.
Nor does an appeal to the common good settle whose purposes should govern. Judgments about the common good depend upon whose circumstances receive attention, which consequences carry weight, and what forms of reliance people are prepared to accept. Institutions may affirm universal benefit while excluding affected communities from those judgments.
Technical competence, financial resources, political authority, security, and social need each sustain claims upon development. None supplies a sufficient account of the whole. Their unequal institutional power bears upon which claims govern, which remain negotiable, and which lack any effective means of expression.
Where institutions treat one criterion as sufficient, their judgments substitute a partial measure for the relations supporting it. Commercial actors identify expansion with progress. Governments identify predominance with protection. Security authorities identify the prevention of prohibited uses with safety. Providers identify availability with participation. Each identification leaves dependencies outside the account through which the undertaking is justified.
The answer on the screen offers the user something immediately available for judgment. Its usefulness may be real. Its fluency does not disclose who determined its conditions, what authority supports its use, or how reliance upon it influences subsequent judgment. The emerging capacities of artificial intelligence extend the consequences of those relations. Those who delegate authority to systems require knowledge of the conditions governing the systems and powers to withhold, limit, or revoke that delegation. Those affected without participating in the delegation stand in a different relation: their ability to contest its consequences depends upon access to the grounds of decisions and institutional means of holding the delegating authorities answerable.
Ricardo Morín, Wrestlers, 2026. CGI after the artist’s original clay sculpture of 1975. 12 × 9 in., excluding the oval pedestal.
The Cybertruck makes its material character unusually conspicuous. Along its side, a rising windshield meets a pronounced roof crest before the upper outline descends toward the rear. Broad stainless-steel planes extend beneath this angular profile, interrupted by dark wheel surrounds and panel boundaries. Reflections change abruptly at the folds; across the larger surfaces, they spread with comparatively little modulation from curvature. The circular wheels provide a contrasting geometry, but the dominant impression of the body remains the repetition of flatness and sharp transition. Its conspicuousness concentrates attention on a small number of insistently reiterated features.
Tesla’s Q4 and FY 2024 Update, released on 29 January 2025, describes the steel’s contribution to structural stiffness and the bending process developed to manufacture its exterior. These are engineering achievements with ascertainable purposes. [1] Their technical significance leaves the perceptual relationship among the surfaces unresolved. The eye encounters extensive planes and emphatic boundaries; an account of material strength does not introduce further differentiation into those surfaces. Knowledge of their construction can inform attention without determining the quality of the encounter. The reasons for producing a form cannot substitute for the experience of encountering it.
Departure from convention acquires aesthetic significance through what the departure makes perceptible. In her account of Cubism for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sabine Rewald describes the fragmentation of familiar objects, the compression of pictorial depth, and the combination of contrasting viewpoints within a composition. [2] These operations altered the visible relations through which a subject could be apprehended. Recognition persisted while the means of recognition became unstable. The encounter demanded renewed attention to how objects were represented and perceived. Angularity participated in that transformation; angularity alone did not constitute it.
Arte Povera likewise gave unconventional materials a specific artistic function. The Museum of Modern Art’s account identifies the use of soil, rags, and other ordinary substances with an effort to develop a sculptural language that challenged the commercialization of art. [3] Their material poverty concerned their standing within artistic hierarchies, rather than demonstrating an absence of artistic sensibility. The economic relation changes when an exposed industrial surface becomes a distinction through which a manufactured commodity acquires desirability. Resemblance between materials does not preserve the purposes for which they are employed. The appearance of artistic departure can become a recognizable attribute detached from the perceptual discovery that gave the departure significance.
Drabness can consequently coexist with conspicuousness. An object may distinguish itself sharply from its surroundings while offering relatively little variation within its dominant gesture. Scale, brightness, and strangeness can secure immediate attention without sustaining a comparably differentiated encounter. Elaborate references can produce a similar limitation when their recognition exhausts what they offer. The initial impression promises an experience that continued attention finds little opportunity to develop.
Mystified drabness arises when the promise acquires greater authority than the encounter. Exposed material becomes evidence of authenticity; conspicuous difference becomes evidence of innovation; historical quotation becomes evidence of cultural depth. Each attribute may contribute to an accomplished work. The substitution occurs when recognition of the attribute is accepted as sufficient evidence of that accomplishment. Taste approaches its own antithesis as the identification of approved signs displaces the exercise of discrimination.
The language through which these attributes acquire authority can reproduce the same condition. A preliminary formulation of this argument attributed the Cybertruck’s appearance to the use of the wrong mathematics. That formulation gave an aesthetic judgment the apparent precision of a technical finding. Yet it identified neither an erroneous calculation nor a geometric relationship whose correction would establish the perceptual quality of the form. Its certainty supplied what its terms left unexamined. Recognition of mathematical authority can secure assent before the reader asks what has actually been demonstrated.
The substitution becomes consequential when such a judgment circulates independently of its grounds. The charge of employing the wrong mathematics can be detached and repeated while retaining the appearance of an explanation. An account of proportion, surface, scale, and transition requires the relationships under consideration to remain available for examination. Where attention acquires commercial value, the brevity and apparent completeness of the declaration can become advantages: the claim offers a conclusion that can be recognized and transmitted with little accompanying context. The same compression that facilitates circulation can conceal the work the judgment has omitted.
Firmness remains compatible with discrimination when its reach is supported by what the reader can examine. Demonstration gives emphasis its substance. The substitution occurs when the force of the sentence is accepted in place of that work. Whether conveyed through language or embodied in an object, the sign of accomplishment can become easier to circulate than the relationships through which accomplishment would be established.
Architecture gives this substitution an encompassing physical setting. A Disneyland aesthetic emerges where historical and cultural symbols are simplified into immediately recognizable effects. Picturesque façades, ornamental quotations, and theatrical sequences solicit the imagination through associations already selected and arranged for consumption. History supplies atmosphere; cultural difference supplies decorative variety. The circumstances that gave the borrowed forms their significance recede behind the impressions they can be made to deliver.
The invitation to imagine is itself commodified. Participation is directed toward identifying the allusion, receiving its promised mood, and moving to the next impression. The tensions, ambiguities, and accumulated experience through which a symbol acquires depth become obstacles to immediate legibility. Their removal makes the encounter easier to package and repeat. Different façades promise different worlds while reproducing the same abbreviated relation to their subjects. Symbolic abundance conceals the poverty of that relation, and the succession of effects distracts from how little remains to be encountered beyond them.
Mathematical complexity can sustain the same condition through another visual vocabulary. Elaborate geometry offers an immediately legible sign of technical distinction, just as a picturesque façade offers a sign of historical continuity. Neither establishes how entrances, thresholds, daylight, acoustics, and gathering places support the life conducted within a building. When the image supplies the principal measure of achievement, the continuing experience of occupation becomes subordinate to the impression prepared for recognition. Theatrical historicism and geometric spectacle can thus converge in their treatment of the inhabitant as the recipient of an effect.
In Vienna during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the search for an architecture responsive to contemporary life prompted a reconsideration of historical styles, the role of ornament, and the organization of inhabited spaces. The different responses to these questions show how sensibility could operate through both ornament and restraint. The Vienna Secession’s architectural history records how Joseph Maria Olbrich coordinated geometric volumes, symbolic ornament, and exhibition space in its building. The institution’s continuing use of those spaces also demonstrates their capacity to accommodate changing artistic activity. [4] Adolf Loos pursued another relationship between restraint and experience. In her study for the National Gallery of Victoria, curator Amanda Dunsmore describes his attention to timber, marble, and brass, together with his preference for interiors that inhabitants could adapt to their own tastes. His opposition to prescribed decoration coexisted with concern for comfort and individual use. [5] Ornament and its suppression therefore provide insufficient grounds for distinguishing sensibility from impoverishment. The distinction emerges through the relationships a work sustains among its materials, its spaces, and those who encounter it.
The resources through which such relationships acquire physical presence are consequential. The Secession’s building history records that the City of Vienna provided the site and that patrons, including the industrialist Karl Wittgenstein, contributed to construction funding. Proceeds from the association’s inaugural exhibition supplied the remaining funds. [4] Its institutional departure depended on arrangements that enabled an alternative to acquire a physical presence. The imagination that conceives a different environment must negotiate access to the means of realizing it.
Those means remain profoundly unequal. The World Inequality Report 2026 estimates that the wealthiest tenth of the global population owns three-quarters of its wealth, while the poorest half owns two per cent. [6] These figures do not establish an aesthetic consequence by themselves. Their relevance lies in the unequal resources available to commission buildings, secure premises, maintain workshops, and sustain work whose value may take time to become recognized. The capacity to imagine another environment and the capacity to bring it into existence are distributed differently.
Greater access to expression has not removed this disparity. In its published overview of the 2026 report Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity, UNESCO describes expanded access to creative tools, markets, and audiences alongside persistent insecurity in creators’ livelihoods. [7] Individual distinction can become highly visible while the means of sustaining independent practice remain fragile. The circulation of an image, a declaration, or an unconventional appearance establishes its visibility; the resources required to develop and sustain the practice behind it remain a separate concern.
Dress, possessions, and private surroundings offer immediate fields of choice. These choices can preserve and develop sensibility, but their availability does not confer comparable influence over the spaces beyond them. Where individuality finds its most accessible expression through purchasable distinctions, the market can accommodate dissatisfaction without surrendering control over the conditions that occasion it. The capacity to select among available signs of difference can expand while the capacity to determine shared conditions remains restricted.
Countercultural activity persists within this interval. Its existence demonstrates that sensibility has not disappeared. Its visibility cannot establish that the resources, institutions, and collective continuity required for a broader transformation have assembled. Dissatisfaction, creative invention, and the power to alter shared conditions remain distinct. The distance between them gives the present uncertainty its substance. [8]
