She travels around the country dressed in white, with rosaries hanging from her neck. Women cry in her arms, men ask her to save them. Last week, the government arrested her chief bodyguard, so she roamed the streets without protection.
As she climbed onto the windshield of her battered car — a makeshift stage — her followers rushed to touch her. One of them handed her a hand-drawn portrait. In the unframed image, Maria Corina Machado was protected by the Venezuelan flag and the arms of Jesus Christ.
“Maria!” one of her supporters shouted, “help us!”
Machado, 56, is the Venezuelan opposition leader who has most recently struck fear into the ruling party. In a matter of months, she has emerged from the political periphery to build a powerful social movement capable of drawing thousands to the streets and perhaps millions to the ballot box.
She did not run for president, but she is the driving force behind the main opposition candidate, a little-known diplomat named Edmundo González.
The mobilization that Machado has catalyzed comes after years of political apathy in Venezuela, where President Nicolas Maduro’s government has quashed protests and detained dissidents, helping to fuel a massive exodus of the country’s population.
An effort backed by the Trump administration to install a young lawmaker named Juan Guaidó as interim president failed, and Guaidó fled to the United States last year.
Now Machado, a former conservative lawmaker once shunned by her own colleagues, has not only rallied Venezuela’s fractious opposition behind her but also captivated a broad swath of the electorate with the promise of a radical change of government.
Even his former critics say Machado’s movement is the most important in the country since the one built by Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s mentor and 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 people’s weariness with Maduro,” said Andrés Izarra, who served 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 recorded in a country without war in at least 50 years, according to economists. Although the situation has improved slightly in recent years, millions of people are still unable to afford enough food or essential medicines.
If Maduro remains in power, polls show large numbers of Venezuelans plan to leave the country in a northward movement that could begin weeks before the U.S. presidential election.
“For the future of our children!” shouted a young woman as Machado’s car drove slowly through the town of Guanare, a six-hour drive west of the capital, Caracas.
That morning, Machado’s security chief had become the latest in a series of opposition campaign members to be detained by the government. To elude authorities, the opposition leader left Caracas before dawn, her car windows still cracked from rocks thrown by Maduro supporters.
Late in the afternoon, she was perched on the roof of her car in Guanare, wearing pearl earrings and her hair in a ponytail.
The cries of support reached their peak. Next to her, a man who was barefoot asked how he could help protect her.
In a barely audible speech delivered through a megaphone, Machado promised to revive the economy and bring back her children who had emigrated.
His popularity will be put to the test on Sunday when the country holds a presidential election that could end 25 years of socialist rule.
Since taking office in 2013, Maduro has held elections intended to legitimize his government. He has often rigged the ballot box in his favor, disqualifying more popular challengers or outright rigging the results.
In January, the Supreme Court ruled that Machado could not run in the elections. Then came the surprise: the government allowed her coalition to nominate another candidate, and González became the consensus choice.
If the opposition wins, Gonzalez, 74, will be president. But from Washington to Caracas, everyone understands that Machado is the heart of the movement.
In a joint interview, the two leaders declined to say what role Machado would play in a Gonzalez government. But Machado said he believed they could win.
“Never in 25 years have we gone into an electoral process with such a strong position,” he said.
The country is on edge as the vote approaches. Polls show huge support for the opposition. But Maduro has shown little interest in leaving power. Last week, he promised at a campaign rally that Venezuela would descend “into a bloodbath, into a fratricidal civil war” if he did not win.
Machado, the eldest of four daughters of a prominent family of steel businessmen, was educated at an elite Catholic school in Caracas and a boarding school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. In an interview with The New York Times In 2005, he defined his early years as “a childhood shielded from contact with reality.”
She trained as an engineer and then took a position in the family business, Sivensa, before working with her mother in a home for abandoned children.
She entered political activism in 2002, when she helped found a voter rights group, Súmate, which ended up leading an unsuccessful attempt to recall Chávez. She was one of Washington’s favorite leaders — the U.S. government provided financial support to Súmate — and became one of Chávez’s most hated adversaries.
But it was not only the government that hated her. Among her colleagues in the opposition, she was often considered too conservative, too confrontational and too much of a “sifrina” to become a leader of the movement.
She has said the politician she most admires is Margaret Thatcher, a conservative icon known for her stubbornness and loyalty to the free market. Machado has long supported privatizing 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 lawmaker, she confronted Chávez in a televised debate, accusing him of robbing Venezuelans through expropriations.
Chávez mocked her. “An eagle does not hunt a fly, congresswoman,” he told her. He was the eagle. She was the fly.
Because of her bombastic rhetoric, journalists and analysts began to describe Machado as the “Iron Lady” of her country, using the nickname by which Thatcher was known.
Questions remain about Machado’s actions in 2002, when dissident military officers and opposition figures led a short-lived coup aimed at overthrowing Chavez. Machado was at the presidential palace during the inauguration of the new president, Pedro Carmona.
In the 2005 interview with the Times, Machado insisted that she and her mother were at 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 stressed that “Western democracies” should understand that Maduro would only leave power in the face of a “credible, imminent and severe threat of the use of force” in order to remove Maduro from power.
But today, Machado’s supporters say this tough, confrontational attitude is exactly what the country needs.
She, for her part, has also moderated her tone, and now leads with a softness that crosses political boundaries, with the promise of uniting families separated by migration.
She is the mother of three adult children living abroad.
Henrique Capriles, an opposition leader who has been critical of Machado in the past, said her political independence ultimately benefits her, allowing her to win the trust of voters disenchanted with the rest of the opposition.
But he added that Gonzalez, a calm diplomat, might be better suited to the delicate task of dismantling the 25-year-old socialist system. Within power sectors such as the armed forces, Machado is likely to be seen as an antagonistic figure seeking revenge against those associated with Maduro.
During his election campaign, he promised to “bury socialism forever” and create a country where “crooks and corrupt people go to jail.”
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“Edmundo does not generate fear,” Capriles said. “It is not a weakness, but a strength.”
A decade ago, the government banned Machado from leaving the country, considering her lobbying in Washington a threat. Now, it appears that keeping her in the country may have been one of Maduro’s biggest tactical mistakes.
Doris Lugo, 40, attended the event in Guanare and explained that her husband and son had left the country in search of work.
“But they will return,” she said, certain that González and Machado will triumph.
“We have faith in God,” he added, “that the fly will hunt the eagle.”
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