She travels the country in white, rosaries swinging from her neck. Women cry in her arms, men beg her for salvation. Stripped of her bodyguard last week by the government, she traverses the streets unprotected.
As she climbs on to the windshield of her battered car – her makeshift stage – supporters jostle to touch her. One passes her a hand-drawn portrait. Inside the frameless image, María Corina Machado is shielded by the Venezuelan flag and the arms of Jesus Christ.
“María!” yells one supporter, “help us!”
Machado (56), the newest leader of Venezuela’s opposition, has struck fear into the hearts of the country’s ruling party. In a matter of months, she has emerged from the political sidelines to build a powerful social movement capable of bringing thousands of people to the streets – and perhaps millions to the ballot box.
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She is not the one running for president, but she is the driving force behind the main opposition candidate, a little-known diplomat named Edmundo González.
The mobilisation Machado has catalysed follows years of political apathy in Venezuela, where the government of President Nicolás Maduro has crushed protests and arrested dissidents, helping to spur an enormous exodus from the country.
An effort backed by the Trump administration to instal a young legislator named Juan Guaidó as interim president failed, and last year Guaidó fled to the United States.
Now, Machado, a conservative former member of the national assembly once rejected by her own colleagues, has not only corralled Venezuela’s fractious opposition behind her, but has also captivated a broad swath of the electorate with a promise of sweeping government change.
Even former critics say her movement is the country’s most important since the one built by Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s mentor and the founder of Venezuela’s 25-year-old socialist project.
A key difference is that “Chavismo coalesced around an ideological proposal for the country” – socialism – while “María Corina’s movement revolves around the people’s weariness with Madurismo”, said Andrés Izarra, who worked as Chávez’s communications minister before becoming a government critic and going into exile.
Under Maduro, the country has witnessed an extraordinary economic contraction – the largest outside of war in at least 50 years, economists say. While the economy has improved slightly in recent years, millions of people still cannot afford enough food or critical medications.
If Maduro stays in power, polls show that large numbers of Venezuelans plan to flee the country, a northward movement that could begin weeks before the US presidential election.
“For the future of our children!” shouted one young woman as Machado’s car last week rolled through the city of Guanare, a six-hour drive west of Caracas, the capital.
That morning, Machado’s security adviser was the latest in a string of campaign members to be arrested by the government. To evade authorities, the opposition leader sped out of Caracas before dawn, her car windows still bearing the cracks from rock-throwing Maduro supporters.
By late afternoon, she had climbed on to her car’s roof in Guanare, wearing pearl earrings and a ponytail.
The cries of support reached fever pitch. At her side, a man without shoes asked how he could help protect her.
In a barely audible speech delivered through a megaphone, Machado promised to revive the economy and bring children who had migrated back home.
Her popularity will be tested on Sunday, when the country holds a presidential election that could bring an end to 25 years of socialist rule.
Since taking office in 2013, Maduro has held elections to try to lend legitimacy to his government. He has often tilted the ballot box in his favour, banning popular competitors or outright inventing the results.
In January, a high court ruled that Machado was barred from the ballot. Then came a surprise: The government allowed her coalition to nominate a different candidate, and González became the consensus choice.
If the opposition wins, González (74), will be president. But from Washington to Caracas, everyone understands that Machado is the driving force behind the movement.
In a joint interview, the pair declined to say what role Machado would have in a González administration. But Machado said she believed they could win. “Never in 25 years have we gone into an election in such a strong position,” she said.
As the vote nears, the nation is on tenterhooks. Polls show enormous support for the opposition. But Maduro has shown little interest in giving up power. Last week, he vowed at a campaign event that Venezuela would fall “into a bloodbath, into a fratricidal civil war” if he didn’t win.
The eldest of four daughters in a prominent steel business family, Machado attended an elite Catholic girls’ school in Caracas and a boarding school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. In a 2005 interview with the New York Times, she called her youth “a childhood protected from contact with reality”.
She trained as an engineer and then took a position in the family company, Sivensa, before working with her mother in a home for abandoned children.
She became a political activist in 2002, helping to found a voter rights group, Súmate, that eventually led a failed effort to recall Chávez. She was a darling of Washington – the US government provided financial aid to Súmate – and became one of Chávez’s most detested adversaries.
But it wasn’t just the government that loathed her. Among colleagues in the opposition, she was often viewed as too conservative, too confrontational and too “sifrina” – Venezuelan for “snobbishly high class” – to become the movement’s leader.
Machado has said that the politician she most admires is Margaret Thatcher, the conservative icon known for her stubbornness and fealty to the free market. And Machado has long supported privatising PDVSA, the state oil company, a move other opposition leaders say would put Venezuela’s most valuable resource in the hands of a few.
In 2012, when Machado was a legislator, she clashed with Chávez in a televised debate, accusing him of robbing everyday Venezuelans through expropriation.
Chávez mocked her. “Eagles don’t hunt flies,” he told her. He was the eagle. She was the fly.
For her bullish rhetoric, journalists and analysts began to call Machado her country’s “iron lady”,” the nickname given to Thatcher.
Questions still surround Machado’s actions in 2002, when dissident military officers and opposition figures led a short-lived coup meant to oust Chávez. Machado was at the presidential palace during the installation of a new president, Pedro Carmona.
In the 2005 interview with the New York Times, Machado insisted that she and her mother were in the palace that day only to visit Carmona’s wife, a family friend – not to support the coup.
More recently, in a 2019 interview with the BBC, Machado called on “Western democracies” to understand that Maduro would leave power only “in the face of a credible, imminent and severe threat of the use of force”.
Today, Machado’s supporters say this battle-ready toughness is exactly what the country needs.
She has also moderated her tone, and now leads with an accompanying softness, cutting across political lines by promising to unite families separated by migration.
She is a mother of three adult children, all of whom live abroad.
Henrique Capriles, an opposition leader who has criticised Machado in the past, said her political independence ultimately benefited her, allowing her to gain the trust of voters disenchanted by the rest of the opposition.
Still, he added that González, a quiet diplomat, might be better suited for the delicate task of dismantling the 25-year-old socialist system. Within power sectors like the armed forces, Machado is likely to be seen as an antagonistic figure looking to exact retribution on those associated with Maduro.
On the campaign trail, she has promised to “bury socialism forever” and create a nation where “the criminals and the corrupt go to prison”.
“Edmundo doesn’t generate fear,” Capriles said. “That’s not a weakness, it’s a strength.”
A decade ago, the government banned Machado from leaving the country, clearly viewing her lobbying in Washington as a threat. Now, it seems that keeping her at home may have been one Maduro’s biggest tactical errors.
Doris Lugo (40) attended the event in Guanare, explaining that her husband and son had left the country in search of work.
“But soon they will return,” she said, confident that González and Machado would triumph.
“We have faith in God,” she added, “that the fly is going to trap the eagle.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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