Marcos Falcone
Over 26 years, Venezuela’s gradual transition from a democracy into a dictatorship involved increasing authoritarianism on the part of the Chávez-Maduro regime. It also involved ineffective opposition leaders, who were often divided and unable or unwilling to challenge the socialist dictatorship or its ideological foundations. However, María Corina Machado, the current opposition leader and a recent recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, was always different.
Machado is a classical liberal. Throughout her career, she has consistently supported civil and political liberties in Venezuela as well as free markets and the reform of the education and health systems, among other failing public services. She also supports the privatization of oil, which has been controlled by the state since 1976. In the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, Machado’s proposal represents a structural break from the past and from a major source of Venezuela’s problems.
Machado opposed the Chávez-Maduro socialist regime from day one. During Hugo Chávez’s first presidency, Machado founded Súmate, an NGO that collected 3.2 million signatures to call for a 2004 recall referendum. This was the first large-scale effort to democratically remove Chávez from power, as his authoritarianism was becoming more pronounced. Although Chávez declared himself the winner, there is strong evidence that this was a fraudulent election and that he might actually have lost it.
Despite the 2004 setback, Machado continued to fight Chávez and, later, his successor Nicolás Maduro. After becoming a member of the National Assembly in 2011, Machado famously confronted Chávez to his face and denounced his nationalizations as theft. She launched a bid for president in 2012 but ended up supporting opposition candidate Henrique Capriles after losing to him in a primary. She remained influential, though, and was one of the top leaders during the protests over the rigged 2013 elections that followed Chávez’s death. Like his predecessor, Maduro declared himself the winner in a fraudulent election.
But Machado did not give up, even in the face of political persecution directed at her—including a 2014 ban on leaving Venezuela, which, until last December, meant that she had not left the country for over a decade until she secretly escaped to receive the Nobel Prize. As the socioeconomic crisis in Venezuela deepened and the destructive effects of socialism became more acute—among them hyperinflation and continuing emigration—Machado launched a new bid for president in 2023. She won over 90 percent of the vote in a unified opposition primary, which prompted the regime to ban her candidacy. She then threw her support behind Edmundo González Urrutia for the 2024 presidential election, leading to his victory with almost 70 percent of the vote.
Indeed, the 2024 election proved to the world how effective a leader Machado has become. Despite decades of repression, persecution, and fraud, her team assembled a vast network of election observers across Venezuela who campaigned for González Urrutia and were able to deliver true results on election night. Machado’s political party, Vente Venezuela, set up over 60,000 small campaign units, each composed of ten activists, who worked in secret to oversee the vote-counting process across the country. This was an unprecedented and massive logistical challenge that was carried out impeccably and that provided crystal-clear evidence of fraud.
Machado has repeatedly shown that she is able to mobilize her fellow citizens in a way that no other leader has been able to do, but the fact that she also has the right ideas to restore liberty and prosperity in her country is crucial. Previous opposition leaders opposed the Chávez-Maduro dictatorship but shared much of their socialist-inspired ideological foundations. Capriles, for example, infamously said that Brazilian left-wing president Lula da Silva, a friend of Chávez and Maduro, was his political inspiration. Leopoldo López and Juan Guaidó, who also led the Venezuelan opposition at some point in the past, belong to Voluntad Popular, a political party that was for years part of the Socialist International.
Machado never backed down from her classical liberal ideas, even when doing so would have been politically beneficial to her. Now, after the destructive effects of socialism have become apparent, she has become by far the most favorably viewed politician in Venezuela. This is because of her uncompromising ideals, not in spite of them, as was recently suggested in The New York Times. The Venezuelan people are tired of ineffective leaders.
It makes little sense for the Trump administration to sustain the remnants of the Chávez-Maduro regime when a legitimate and well-organized alternative under the leadership of Machado exists. Maduro’s forced exit is not enough to turn Venezuela into a more reliable business partner, which seems to be a major goal for Trump. A struggle for power within the regime may take place at any moment and cause it to collapse, particularly after the US has signaled that it could now go after Diosdado Cabello, the regime’s feared security chief.
But even if the Chávez-Maduro regime does not collapse from within, it is still so unpopular that political uncertainty will continue and will affect any business plans American companies may have. Why bother with Maduro’s allies? María Corina Machado has consistently shown that she wants to work with the US. If Trump is going to choose sides, the choice is clear.