Citizens to vote on fate of more than 49,000 community development plans
*Venezuelan people are getting ready to vote on Sunday on the second popular consultation.
*Ángel Prado, Minister of Communes and Social Movements, speaks on the community consultation of August 25.
teleSUR
*Ángel Prado, Minister of Communes and Social Movements, speaks on the community consultation of August 25.
teleSUR
Transcript
00:00People are getting ready to go to the polls again on Sunday in the second popular consultation
00:05to define projects of local interest and benefit the communities.
00:09In this regard, citizens will participate in elections to select the communal projects
00:13that will have priority for their execution in the communities of the country as an exercise
00:20to strengthen the participatory democracy.
00:23The elections will allow more than 49,000 communal councils of the country to choose
00:31the local development plan to benefit the communities who are working to improve self-management
00:37and social control.
00:38For his part, the Minister of Communes and Social Movement, Ángel Prado, stressed that
00:44the Bolivarian government is going for a new victory.
00:54On an exclusive interview for TELESUR, Minister of Communes and Social Movement, Ángel Prado
01:02noted that the popular consultation on August 25th will severe the communal councils to
01:08address social projects to provide solutions to the Venezuelan people.
01:17A communal circuit is integrated by several communal councils.
01:21In this case, each communal council raises three projects.
01:26In its first instance, that is, the communal council then goes to the Great Assembly of
01:30the Circuit, each one with its three projects, and there you define between six and seven
01:36projects that will be submitted to vote, in this case next August 25.
01:41There the people will vote for the project they are interested in resolving first, but
01:45there is a second, third project that even has the possibility of having a transfer of
01:50resources to financing if it is not through the Presidency of the Republic.
01:55It can be a mayor's office, a governor's office, or a ministry.
02:00In this regard, Venezuelan Minister Ángel Prado assured us since the government of President
02:05Hugo Chávez, the country needs a seat of participative and inclusive policy.
02:12This sets off by that hopeful time in 1998, a little earlier with Commander Hugo Chávez,
02:18and by 1999, a Constituent Assembly was proposed, and we approved a new constitution,
02:24where we left behind the representative politics to initiate a participative politics of inclusion
02:29of the people, where the people can be involved in administering domestic resources,
02:33and the people can be part of the planning, before.
02:36There were only neighborhood associations that were obsolete organizations, where only
02:40one person, having little contact with some authority of the ruling political party,
02:45would send information.
02:47However, nothing happened at all.
02:49There was no transfer of resources of competence.
02:52Neither the management of the regional government existed, nor popular organization was allowed.
02:59The Venezuelan Minister of Communes also points out that the popular organization through
03:04the communes allows the people to govern the allied authorities as a whole.
03:10The communal councils are born in the communal councils as legal figures that even have a
03:16legal account in a bank, they have an executive structure of government, they have a work
03:20committee, they have a territorial scope, they have a name.
03:23That has a charter that has a development plan, and that the citizens' assembly is the
03:27highest decision-making body, that exercises a social control, and that has a project and
03:32transfer of resources we advanced in this country with the housing mission.
03:36Well, thanks to the birth of the communal councils, those small cells of self-government
03:40in 49,000 spaces of the national territory, there was a boom, it was a real joy in our
03:45people from that moment of the government.
03:47They know how to administer, they know how to manage.
03:50They organize themselves, they execute courses, and well we say there at the base we learn
03:55to be political.