Subduing a people by force and violence, concentrating all power in a person or group, violating human rights and individual freedoms to hold power indefinitely with State terrorism is dictatorship, and constitutes in the 21st century the most serious of crimes against humanity, peace and security. The existence of dictatorships It is the main cause of crisis of our time, since the international system has the legal obligation and the political need to cease.
The international legal order is based on the recognition and guarantee of human rights with the objective of maintaining international peace and security. As a result of the Second World War, states as the main subjects of international law have renounced the absolute concept of sovereignty, giving rise to an international legal system to which they are integrated in their conduct and those of their governments, obliged to comply with principles and norms. of universal validity that are not devoid of coercion.
The polarization between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, and is summarized as the triumph of capitalism over communism. The dissolution of the Soviet Union formally culminated with the independence of the fifteen republics that comprised it between March 11, 1990 and December 26, 1991 and was the termination of the largest communist dictatorship in the world that also ended the Cold War. .
The so-called triumph of capitalism against communism is fundamentally a political fact that marks the victory of freedom against dictatorship, proof that in freedom human beings can live better, produce more and have higher development. It is not just an economic issue, it is a system of political organization, it is the triumph of democracy over dictatorship, of freedom over concentration and abuse of power, of human nature over crime.
The implosion of communism and the dissolution of the USSR was the defeat of dictatorships as a system and proof that this way of holding power ends in misery, underdevelopment, violence and dependence, because it is a criminal system founded on commission and institutionalization of crimes of continuous action, which are repeated indefinitely in order to continue holding power to have impunity.
With this clear evidence, the question is why in the 21st century, dictatorships, instead of becoming extinct, have expanded in the Americas and have repositioned themselves in the world. At the beginning of this century the only dictatorship in the Americas was that of Cuba, that with the socialism of the 21st century turning Castroism into Castrochavism has expanded in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, having controlled Ecuador with Rafael Correa and also controls the paradictatorial governments of Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Brazil. In the world, the dictatorships of China, North Korea and Iran have been reaffirmed and that of Russia and satellites has been established, in addition to the alarming situation in Africa where more than half of the countries can be identified as dictatorships with more than 7 coups d’état in recent years.
Dictatorships harm people, they are an abnormality, they are illegal, but fundamentally they are a crime. The criminal nature of dictatorships is indicated by the Charter of the United Nations, by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by the constituent documents of regional organizations such as the Organization of American States, by the Rome Statute, by the Convention of the United Nations against Transnational Organized Crime or Palermo Convention and many more international treaties and norms, and in the Americas by the Inter-American Democratic Charter, the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance TIAR and more.
The fact that the laws are not complied with does not mean that their validity disappears, it fundamentally represents that those responsible for enforcing them are not fulfilling their obligations for reasons of convenience, political decisions or any other type, which in any case are detrimental to them. The international norms violated by dictatorships are so valid that they serve to indicate the condition of dictatorships and place them in the crime zone.
To try to disguise their criminal nature, dictatorships raise and sustain falsification narratives: the Castro-Chavists of the Americas declare themselves “anti-imperialist,” the African and Russian “nationalist,” China is “popular and communist,” Iran It is “theocratic”, that of North Korea “of national self-confidence” or family. But its characteristics are the same: violation of human rights and freedoms, total concentration of power, state terrorism and its consequences of political prisoners, torture, exile and crimes.
*Lawyer and Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy
