Community Councils: Participation Instruments or Original Power?

Community councils are more than participation instruments. The President of the Republic, Hugo Chavez, has protected their creation and operation, pointing out the need to transfer, "politicals, social, economic and administrative power" from the States and Municipalities, within the framework of what has been called "Communal Power." Furthermore, community councils illustrate the interpretation the national government has regarding citizen intervention in collective participation instruments as a road to full exercise of popular sovereignty. The present paper aims to establish the non-correspondence of the regulation for communal councils with the national Constitution of 1999, using documentary- analytical research on the same fundamental text, the Organic Law for Communal Councils of 2009 and other related legal texts, and the National Simon Bolivar Project 2007-2013. Results verify the correspondence between "Socialism of the 21st century" and the laws, documents and speeches in which it is contained, as well as the intention to achieve "a new form of State, Government, a new form of society," before configuring an authority for shared attention to collective needs.