Caracas Chronicles

The timing was meaningful. Hours after the Trump administration rescinded the oil license that allowed Chevron to operate in Venezuela, Donald Trump Jr released an episode of his podcast, Triggered, with María Corina Machado as its guest. Don Jr presented Machado’s story of persecution under the chavista regimes as a more acute version of what Trump suffered under Biden, according to himself, and labeled her a guardian of Western civilization like Trump, Milei, Meloni and Bukele. María Corina started by defining the Maduro regime as a gang linked with enemies of the U.S., such as Hezbollah and Iran (she did not mention Russia), the “criminal hub of the Americas,” “a safe haven for all the enemies of Western democracies,” “a true threat for the safety and prosperity of the United States.” 

She went on to assure that all the income the State gets from “very obscure oil licenses” goes to propaganda and repression, that thousands of Venezuelan passports were delivered to Islamic terrorists, and that Cartel de los Soles is linked to Tren de Aragua. María Corina said that Maduro is the head of Tren de Aragua, and that he promoted the migration of honest, good people to “destabilize the region.”

When Don Jr asked her whether Maduro opened the prisons to invade the U.S. with criminals, Machado answered tangentially. She repeated that Tren de Aragua has operations in several countries, including the U.S., that it funds the government, and added that Diosdado Cabello “received Tren de Aragua members like heroes,” referring to the Venezuelans deported by the Trump government (it’s unknown if they belonged to the gang) after the visit of special envoy Richard Grenell. Don Jr said that he has met Venezuelans in Florida who escaped from Maduro, and that it was Biden who allowed illegal and dangerous Venezuelans to enter the country. Machado said that “most of the Venezuelans abroad are good people”—and Don Jr agreed, aware that many of them voted for his father, after which Machado agreed that Biden’s was a weak government that allowed Maduro to survive.    

While Don Jr kept turning the conversation back to criticizing Biden and celebrating his father, Maria Corina was attempting to present him the wildly optimistic pitch that Venezuela just needs decisive, urgent help from the U.S. to end, “peacefully,” the rule of Maduro, for the benefit of both Americans and Venezuelans. She deliberately omitted mentioning Russia as a backer and insisted that the military is against Maduro, but under surveillance by Chinese technology. 

Machado defines herself as “a liberal” (which means, in contemporary Latin America, a supporter of open markets and a critic of leftist economic policy) and has a history of relationships with a range of right wing leaders across the world.

Maria Corina knows how to get the attention of people like the Trumps, because they do have ideological affinities. “People said I was crazy when I started to talk against socialism twenty years ago,” she added.  That she openly supported sanctions, when it’s strictly prohibited by the chavista regime, and asked for American help is rare in Latin American political culture, but coherent with her own path. A few weeks ago, Machado was in a video call with the Patriots, an alliance of nationalist anti-EU parties hosted by Vox in Madrid. She thanked the support of leaders who had based their political careers on deploring immigration, saying that gender violence does not exist, denouncing gay and reproductive rights as campaigns to destroy Western values, and being apologetic of brutal dictatorships like those of Franco or Mussolini.

But those movements are longtime friends of Machado and Vente Venezuela. In October 2020, she and some members of her party signed an open letter with Abascal, Meloni, Milei and many other people—some of them popular Venezuelan pundits with zero political influence beyond social media—denouncing the communist threat in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. Machado defines herself as “a liberal” (which means, in contemporary Latin America, a supporter of open markets and a critic of leftist economic policy) and has a history of relationships with a range of right wing leaders across the world. She might have approached the center before and after the 2023 opposition primaries that she won in a landslide, but in early 2025, after Maduro perpetrated the famous election fraud and having witnessed the total inability of Petro and Lula to negotiate Maduro’s exit, Machado finds herself in the brink of being betrayed by a few actors in the Unitary Platform, and needing of her old friends—the sort that now sit in the Oval Office. How did the international relations of María Corina come to be?

From NGO leader to opposition hawk

Machado emerged outside political parties, and after watching the failure of the 2002 coup attempt up close, she entered public affairs with a platform that allowed her to counter Chávez early on in the game of “participatory democracy” of 21st-century socialism. Súmate, the organization she founded with Alejandro Plaz in 2002, has remained relevant over the years as a pioneering force in defending voting rights and electoral transparency, educating Venezuelans on elections, and exposing the abuses of the CNE.

The organization led the signature collection process for the 2004 recall referendum—a process riddled with obstacles, including the infamous leak of the Tascón List—and earned the sworn enmity of the early chavismo. Not only because it was the first time Chávez was challenged on his own playing field and by his own election rules, even though the opposition went on to lose the referendum by a wide margin. But also because it was done with the overt help of the U.S. government, whose National Endowment for Democracy (now fighting for survival against the budget cuts of Elon Musk and Pete Marocco) provided the funding for Súmate’s doings.

NED was playing a controversial yet crucial role in funding pro-democracy organizations and movements in territories hostile to the U.S., such as post-Soviet Ukraine. It was a source of deep resentment for the likes of Chávez and Putin, who were beginning to be hegemonic in their countries. Despite all that, María Corina never hid her ties with the gringos and was completely unapologetic about it. On May 31, 2005, she had a 50-minute meeting with then chavismo nemesis President George W. Bush in the Oval Office, beaming with a wide smile. In September, she announced that Súmate had received another disbursement.

In 2011, her interruption of Chávez’s Memoria y Cuenta before the National Assembly has become an iconic moment in popular culture, when she called him a thief (“Yes, Mr. President, expropriating is stealing”) and told him that “decent Venezuela” did not want to move toward communism.

This happened in the middle of the state’s prosecution of Machado, Plaz and other Súmate directors for “treason” and for receiving money from NED to oust Chávez, as chavista loyalists claimed. In any case, the ties were clear. Frank Wolf, a Republican congressman who visited Caracas in June 2005, even warned chavistas that more funds would be sent to Súmate if the government continued to go after Machado, “a folk hero” in the making for Wolf. The trial against Machado, Plaz, and two other Súmate directors (one of which was imprisoned right after the 2024 election fraud) was annulled in February 2006 due to irregularities. María Corina assumed the presidency of Súmate in 2008 and resigned in 2010 to run for a seat in the National Assembly.

There were several milestones in the early years of her political career that earned her a reputation as a fearless and radically anti-chavista figure in the eyes of the public—but defiant among her fellow opposition party members. She defeated Carlos Vecchio in the National Assembly primaries to become the candidate for the most staunchly opposition-leaning constituency in the country—Miranda Circuit #2—with the backing of (guess who) Acción Democrática and Un Nuevo Tiempo, something that gave her bragging rights for being the most-voted candidate in Venezuela.

In 2011, her interruption of Chávez’s Memoria y Cuenta before the National Assembly has become an iconic moment in popular culture, when she called him a thief (“Yes, Mr. President, expropriating is stealing”) and told him that “decent Venezuela” did not want to move toward communism.

She later ran in the opposition primaries as an independent candidate, championing the idea of popular capitalism: an economic model where individuals and Venezuelan mothers in particular could prosper without state aid, create their own businesses, become property owners, and secure their children’s future by “pushing forward.” If you work hard and the state respects what’s yours, todos vamos pa’ arriba, as Thatcher would say in Spanish. Machado would finish third behind Capriles and then-Zulia Governor Pablo Pérez with 3.81% of the votes.

The outsider within

The electoral defeats of Henrique Capriles under the ailing Chávez in 2012 and the apparently weak Maduro in 2013 was perceived by Machado as an opportunity to raise her profile within an opposition wing adamant in removing Maduro as soon as possible, as they claimed the system was rigged beyond repair and saw the next presidential vote too far away. Machado joined Leopoldo López and then-Caracas mayor Antonio Ledezma—two figures with a history of chavista persecution and lacking party structures—in a campaign that placed mass protests as the only exit available, la salida, and for an extended period, de facto divided the opposition between radical salidistas and those that favored dialogue with the Maduro government, led by Capriles. 

The first day of protests in Caracas, on February 12, saw the traumatic killing of two student demonstrators by Maduro agents. An arrest warrant was issued for López, who turned himself in on February 18, while Ledezma was arrested a year later. Both ended up in Spain as political exiles.

Chavismo targeted Machado with outright hate speech and judicial persecution. By the end of 2014, she was banned from running for office and leaving the country, stripped of her seat in parliament, and indicted for an alleged attempt to kill Maduro. The list of physical and verbal attacks against her was already long at that point, including a nasty episode of assault in the National Assembly against her and other opposition lawmakers in 2013.

But for some reason, Maduro decided to keep her free. She seemed like a perfect enemy—a true member of the old economic elite, brazenly right wing and close to Washington DC—and her personal brand as a maverick was useful to present the opposition as an impossible coalition, where she in particular gave constant stick to traditional political parties and their decisions. Yet, she was still far from becoming a national leader.

She was reluctant to join Primero Justicia or Leopoldo’s Voluntad Popular, the two parties more on the right and less polluted by the foul image of old politics, convinced that she could lead her own platform by tapping on anti-communism and a yearning for economic freedoms. She founded the Vente Venezuela party in 2012, which distinguished itself by declaring an ideological orientation, liberal, in a political landscape where parties are often reduced to being for or against Maduro, and valued according to the strategy employed to remove or at least weaken chavismo.

Last year, Machado connected with the Venezuela profunda in an epic campaign on the road that utterly buried chavismo as an electoral force on July 28, where she transferred all her political capital and popular support to the Edmundo González candidacy.

For the 2015 parliamentary elections, the opposition coalition didn’t allow Machado to pick a candidate for the Miranda Circuit #2. The MUD won those elections in a landslide but Vente Venezuela only earned one seat. The composition of the MUD’s majority in the 2015 National Assembly became the structure through which opposition leadership was rotated among parties in the ensuing era, and Machado and Vente Venezuela were left out. The latter was not even a member of the MUD platform.

In the midst of a humanitarian emergency and hyperinflation, Venezuela entered a fast and violent authoritarian spiral where Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular were the main targets of the Maduro elite—with leaders and activists being the subject of systemic arrests, torture and banishment. Vente Venezuela remained a fringe and small, yet compact organization while other parties were forced to split, some opposition lawmakers were coerced by chavismo, and the Venezuelan crisis gained an international outlook more than ever. The grand corruption of Maduro & Co. and their ties to drug trafficking, money laundering and illegal gold trade became a huge argument to lobby for sanctions and garner support from Western countries.

The likes of Julio Borges, Leopoldo López and Juan Guaidó were successful in liaising with right-of-center governments and foreign enemies of Maduro: Republicans and Democrats, Merkel, Macron, the Tories, Álvaro Uribe, Iván Duque, Mauricio Macri, Sebastián Piñera, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and many others. But it was also the advent of anti-establishment parties and nationalist movements, when Trump was first elected, Britain left the EU, and populist outsiders like Santiago Abascal, Giorgia Meloni, Javier Milei and José Antonio Kast began to grow as serious forces in their countries.

Vente Venezuela initially looked like a party that embraced the Austrian school and classic liberal ideas, but it may have aligned with these figures to obtain international recognition from foreign groups also considered too radical in their countries, and who deemed moderate parties as too lenient with political systems and simply incapable of producing comprehensive change. To an extent, their discourses seemed compatible with María Corina’s posture.

Machado supported the interim government of Juan Guaidó from the sidelines, but when time passed and he looked unable to get the FANB’s backing as caretaker president, Machado insisted that the only solution was a foreign military intervention, something dismissed as magical realism by then-special envoy Elliott Abrams in September 2020. This proposal is by the way one of Vladimir Padrino’s favourite arguments to lambast the opposition and Machado’s leadership, and to side with Maduro in times of crisis.

She had to wait until 2023 to see her fortunes change, after many other leaders were pushed out of the country or into a cell, or were simply uneager to confront Maduro. Sympathy for María Corina and Vente Venezuela then grew in numbers. Her discourse and leadership style of non-compromise finally clicked with a frustrated population. Last year, Machado connected with the Venezuela profunda in an epic campaign on the road that utterly buried chavismo as an electoral force on July 28, where she transferred all her political capital and popular support to the Edmundo González candidacy. 

In Trump she trusts?

In the second half of a bipolar 2024, other camps gave a hand to María Corina Machado. Enrique Márquez—a moderate presidential candidate backed by a minor center-left party and endorsed by dissident chavistas like Juan Barreto—challenged the CNE’s absurd results before the Supreme Tribunal in a televised display of bravery that caught chavismo off guard (Márquez is now imprisoned). Machado also thanked Chilean President Gabriel Boric, clearly identified with the democratic left, for calling out the fraud. And she showed patience when Lula da Silva and Gustavo Petro attempted to broker a negotiation process with Maduro after July 28. But Maduro did not even join those Zoom conferences, and Brazil’s role was reduced to being a bullied caretaker of the Argentinean embassy, where Machado’s aides are under siege since Caracas and Buenos Aires broke diplomatic ties.

January came, with her brief kidnapping on day 9 and the illegitimate inauguration on day 10, and Machado found herself back at square one. She remains a leader in hiding, and in the international community, she can see that most are unable to help her much in removing Maduro. Javier Milei, who promptly provided refuge to her team, also became a victim of Maduro’s blackmail when the regime detained an Argentinean police officer in the Táchira border. In practice, many Latin American countries reacted by restricting the entry of Venezuelans. An exhausted European Union didn’t go beyond recognizing Edmundo as the legitimate winner and now faces a paradigmatic crisis before Trump and the ambitions of Putin. Several of the opposition’s old allies are content just by issuing statements and holding ceremonial meetings with González Urrutia. 

So Machado now has to work with those seemingly available and wielding power, which carries the risk of abandonment without notice, due to a potential deal that excludes her interests, or out of plain disinterest. Truth is, no development seems final with the new Trump administration. And at the moment, she may feel like she doesn’t have any other option than to sit down and engage with the MAGA guys. Trump’s world is one of basic, resounding messages, and María Corina is insisting on the motto she expressed to Don Jr: the regime is on the brink of falling, the military is with us, and we just need Donald (whose real intentions about Venezuela are a mystery to anyone) to push bigly.

Will Machado’s return to far-right circles have an effect, apart from the trend of Pérez Jimenez enthusiasts and the tenacity of Magazuelans who still see a savior in Trump? We can’t know for sure. However, we can read this trajectory from right to center, and now back to the right, as a fable not only about the political climate of today—where winds are blowing toward a revolutionary right across the Western hemisphere—but also about the difficulties of making domestic alliances and gaining political ground in a country that looks more totalitarian and dystopian as each day passes.