This weekend, Venezuela celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Constituent Assembly convened by Hugo Chávez to rewrite the constitution and, as the slogan went, "refound the republic." It was a solemn affair, an afternoon of sashes and commemorations capped off by a long presidential keynote speech to parliament, all to honor the drafting of a basically liberal constitution that, as noted public intellectual Teodoro Petkoff once put it, reads more and more like a subversive pamphlet, so far removed are its norms from the way power is actually wielded in Venezuela.
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