In restoring democracy, let us not forget that "criminal acts do not create law."

By: Carlos Sánchez Berzaín - 14/09/2026

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The replacement of the rule of law with state terrorism to institutionalize the dictatorships of 21st-century socialism in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua has been carried out through a long chain of crimes, including forgery, massacres, human rights violations, extortion, usurpation of power, usurpation of the people's rights, treason, and more, resulting in constitutions, laws, and a system born of crime. Under these conditions, in the restoration of democracy, it is essential to remember that criminal acts do not create law; they are null and void.

The fundamental legal principle “ex injuria ius non oritur,” meaning “law does not arise from illegality,” summarizes one of the basic pillars of the rule of law, according to which “no illegal act, crime, or violation of the law can generate a valid legal situation or confer rights upon the person who committed the infraction.” It is the foundation for preventing the legitimization of crime, wrongdoing, and its consequences.

Any product of crime is null and void, and "nullity in law is the invalidity of a legal act that causes a norm or act to cease producing its legal effects." What is null is born dead; it cannot be ratified and only governs—in the case of the legal systems of 21st-century socialism—because it was imposed by force and violence, by crime.

Twenty-first-century socialism has expanded Cuba's dictatorial model, replacing essential elements of democracy with state terrorism, the concentration of power, centralism, impunity, an electoral dictatorship where the people vote but do not choose, and narco-states as a model of criminal control. This is why today Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua are countries with legal structures that violate freedom and human rights, lack the rule of law, simulate separation and independence of powers, impede free political organization, and have institutionalized electoral fraud.

The legal structure imposed by 21st-century socialism, or Castro-Chavismo, is uniform throughout the Americas. It consists of the total concentration of power under the guise of sovereignty, the usurpation of national sovereignty under the guise of populism, the violation of human rights under the banner of liberation, and the formulation of a legal system that violates the law and is devoid of justice. The constitutional and legal systems that Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua have today are neither law nor justice because they are simply not legal; they are the product of crimes and are designed to protect crime.

The crimes committed to supplant or replace a democratic legal structure with a dictatorial one include falsification, usurpation of power, persecution and human rights violations, bloody massacres, and in the case of Cuba, executions, false accusations, political prisoners, torture, exile, confiscations, dismissals, arbitrary removal from office, use of force, violence, extortion, usurpation of the people's rights, and more. Each victimized country has a compendium of these crimes, and the proof lies in its current legal systems and how they were imposed.

The duration of this ignominy—more than 67 years in Cuba, more than 26 in Venezuela, more than 20 in Bolivia, and more than 19 in Nicaragua—has led citizens, especially the younger generation, to submission, to helplessness, and to perceive this infamy as normal. It has produced a change in societal behavior, displacing democratic and republican principles and values ​​with permissive and even criminal attitudes simply to survive or succeed. Therefore, in times of change aimed at restoring democracy, it is vital to clearly identify the crime and strip away its veneer of normality.

The restoration of democracy consists of re-establishing, at a minimum, the legal system with the essential elements of democracy and eliminating the elements of dictatorship that have supplanted them. As long as Castro-Chavista constitutions and laws remain in force in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, there will be no democracy, and those who come to power will be mere operators of a criminal system.

Constitutions and legal systems imposed through crime, force, and violence are now defended using fear. Those who have a vested interest in maintaining them frighten people with the supposed legal insecurity that a return to the rule of law would bring, arguing that everything done under the criminally imposed system would be null and void in civil or commercial law, which is simply not true. They use this argument to propose reforming the criminally imposed system, which would legalize the outcome of the crime by using it as the basis for such a reform.

In each of the affected countries—Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua—the criminal process of imposing constitutions, amendments, reforms, and laws that have shaped their legal systems by 21st-century socialism involves specific crimes and timelines, all with a shared methodology and objective. These are criminal acts through which they have created constitutions and laws that, in the name of returning to democracy, are neither law nor can they be considered as such.

* Lawyer and Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».