Caracas Chronicles

“I have seven children abroad, I want them to come,” said a man in tears to María Corina Machado during her visit to Bolívar state in early June. “I have a pacemaker, but I came here to follow you and tell you I want you to win.” While the man cries, Machado takes his hands. This kind of catharsis –accompanied by the tearful request for the return of family members who have migrated– has become a trademark of Machado’s tours. “I want my dad to come back, please, María Corina,” a child told her with a broken voice in Mérida. Next to him, a teenager, taking Machado’s hand, says: “Help us, please.” On the same tour, a teenager bursts into tears while showing her family abroad from her cell phone screen: “I can’t take this anymore!”, she screams, “I’m tired!”

Like Hugo Chávez during the height of what Spanish journalist Beatriz Lecumberri called “the sentimental revolution,” Machado developed an emotional bond with the crowds of Venezuelans she leads, especially in the countryside –former strongholds of Chavismo– like Biscucuy, Guanarito or Sabana de Mendoza. The bond, says Mirla Pérez –cultural anthropologist and director of the Alejandro Moreno Popular Research Center– is the “commitment to the reconstruction” of Venezuela, represented by the possibility of breaking forth with one’s own work and the reunification of the Venezuelan family separated by the migration.

According to Pérez, Machado’s leadership is unprecedented because it is based on empathy. “She connects with common people and produces a language that can communicate with elites who are not used to looking at what happens below. People see genuine commitment and understanding in her.”

Even Machado admits how she has given way to the emotional in her speech: “During all these years I have taken great care of my affective or emotional dimension, perhaps because we are women in a culture with certain prejudices: ‘if you cry it is because you are weak’… “I have closed myself off to that topic a lot,” she said in a recent interview with Erika de la Vega. “But when you feel that people opened their hearts, you open yours. I feel that this is what has created a different, totally spontaneous connection between many Venezuelans and me.”

This element has been increasing for some time: “Our route is love,” Machado would say in a video from January 1, 2023, where she announced her intention to compete in the primaries. And it has continued since then, also championed by her proxy Edmundo González Urrutia: “They may have control of the CNE, the TSJ, the Prosecutor’s Office,” he said recently, “but we have the love, support and enthusiasm of the vast majority of Venezuelans who want a peaceful change.”

“María Corina upholds the feminine values of politics today, in 2024. In 2012, she was still playing with the cards of masculine values,” says Carmen Beatriz Fernández, an expert in political campaigns. “That has nothing to do with being a man or a woman. There are many male politicians whose flags are the feminine values of politics. Barack Obama is one, and he did it very successfully. When María Corina moves and makes all the cities in the country cry, she is moving a feeling and connecting through very emotional means, which is a very feminine attribute. All this talk about reunion of the country, and also the reunion of families supported by the eight million migrants, are testimonies that she collects in each town she visits. One cries with these testimonies because we all have a rosary of personal crosses.”

María Corina, the mother

Machado, who constantly celebrates Venezuelan mothers in her speeches, has also connected with the maternal figure, “the strongest cultural structure” of Venezuelan culture, says Pérez, which anthropologists describe as “matricentric” because of the role mothers have in providing sustenance and cohesion to their families. “In Venezuela, practically the entire community layer is supported by the work of women. You will hardly find structures led by men in a popular community,” she explains, “Machado has a series of attributes typical of a Venezuelan mother” such as firmness, perseverance and cunning.

“Venezuelan culture is based on the mother, who runs the family with a lot of effort,” says Pérez, “so, one of the biggest frustrations that we have in Venezuela, and that the Venezuelan mother has, is not being able to avoid the departure of her children.” Thus, she explains, Machado becomes “a proposal that seeks the reestablishment of cultural order, the reestablishment of coexistence.” Even the proposal, narrated by Machado’s voice, now appears in pop singer Danny Ocean’s music videos.

But the wound of the decomposition of the Venezuelan family also becomes a challenge to Chavista control. “What matters most to Venezuelans is affectivity, it is coexistence, it is family. That’s the most important thing,” she says. “So, when you take it away from them, you take away their soul. And here comes the question: what else do you want to take from me?” Thus, situations like those described by Delsa Solórzano –another opposition leader– happen on her tours with Machado: “They are going to take away my CLAP bag, that thing of no use? Take it away from me, I don’t care,” people in areas controlled by the communal structures of Chavismo tell her.

A new social contract?

In fact, the sentimental leadership that Chavismo once had has also been discredited by those same communal structures: it became “an apparatus of coercion and domination, which is what we will later understand or know as the communal State”, Perez says. “When this leadership is no longer freely adhered to, it then begins to become a structure that no longer has attachment, but rather was imposed on the different communities and the people had no other choice but to adhere to a system of control.”

Thus, through domination, the chavista leadership lost the emotional connection with the population that supported it, says Pérez. “When that happens, all the communicating, affective, relational, and bonding vessels break because it fossilizes; that [emotional] bond is no longer functional.”

In fact, the use of social programs and clientelist networks to coerce –as well as the excessive intervention of the petrostate in public life and the economic and humanitarian consequences of its collapse in the last decade– have generated “a cultural change,” says historian Margarita López Maya, specialized in the Venezuelan left. “The Venezuelan State was the supplier, the producer, the intervener, the one that guaranteed you,” she explains. “But now favorable conditions are emerging for a more capitalist society.” According to López Maya, the population now distrusts the State and “tries to look out for itself, which is what capitalism and market individualism say.” For López Maya, this is reflected in the rise of entrepreneurship in low-income communities. According to a joint study by the Institute of Higher Administration Studies (IESA) and the Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB), Venezuela today has 4.7 million entrepreneurs –more than the entire population of Panama– and 91% of them do so for subsistence.

In this context, Machado openly speaks about privatizing PDVSA, a proposal that would have been political suicide in Venezuela a few years ago, and she does not offer subsidies or social assistance but rather a free market and the opportunity to emerge through one’s own work. “In the focus groups [in the neighborhoods and rural areas] you no longer get people who talk to you about the rich country that is going to solve your problems,” Pérez says. “It is the country of professionals, the country of fighters, the country of people who are capable of carrying out an entire transformation process.”

With the participation of Alejandra Otero and Felipe Torres