Venezuela's president proposes to endorse new Constitution through consultative referendum

AVN.- Venezuela's President, Nicolas Maduro, will propose to take the new Constitution, resulting from the constitutional process convened last May 1 by the National Executive, to an consultative referendum for the people to decide whether or not to apply it.

"At the end of the process, and I will propose it explicitly, openly and unequivocally. The new Constitution will go to consultative referendum so that it is the people who say whether they agree or disagree with the new reinforced constitution ... Let no one have doubts about this, we are children of a democratic, popular process," President said in statements to state media.

At the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, the President said this call, established in article 347 of 1999's Constitution, aims to curb the violent attacks perpetrated by seditious squads financed by opposition sectors in the last two months, leaving more than 60 dead and more than 1,000 injured.

"Seeing the circumstances, the international harassment of the extremists governing the United States and seeing the plans of the domestic right, I said: 'Here is a single way to build peace, to overcome the attempt to get us into war, to reconcile the Venezuelans and to move further down the road to democracy and freedom. New times, hope, life, prosperity, and that only way is called the National Constituent Assembly," he said.

He stressed that this process, whose 364 territorial and 181 sectoral members will be elected at the end of July, will strengthen the Magna Carta, approved by popular power in 1999, because it will be created "with the revolutionary wisdom of its people."

"A new leadership begins to emerge, a leadership of a social, a citizen nature ... The National Constituent Assembly is already owned by the people and I will simply continue to be a driving force in the real participation of this National Constituent Assembly," he said.