María Corina Machado and Elon Musk join forces on Twitter against Chavismo

The opposition presidential candidate María Corina Machado and the technology magnate Elon Musk crossed paths in a thread on the social network X – formerly Twitter – and in a political definition. This week, the tech guru responded to a post by American television commentator John Stoessel about the South American country. “Venezuela has great wealth in natural resources. “If Chávez had not destroyed his economy by increasing the role of the government to extreme socialism, the country would be very prosperous,” wrote Musk, a regular commentator on the social network that he made his own a couple of years ago after paying $44 billion and considerably lowering its value after handling.

He was responding to a post where Stoessel re-circulated a video of his, published five years ago, in which he explains what in his opinion is socialism and the consequent mismanagement of planned economies, which has led to the collapse of what was one of the most prosperous nations in Latin America and also in other countries that adopted similar regimes, such as Cuba, Vietnam or Cambodia, far from the ideas of the free market and liberalism.

Machado has taken advantage of the exchange to join. “The Venezuelan people are fighting for freedom and democracy against the extreme socialist regime imposed by Chávez 25 years ago,” he responded to Musk through Musk's social network, which entered the top of the trends on his platform in Venezuela. . He assured her that the country would be prosperous again “once we overcome the Maduro dictatorship.”

The leader, on whom Chavismo has placed a siege to prevent her from competing in the presidential elections on July 28, has promoted her dialogue with the international community to add support to the opposition cause and denounce violations of the Barbados Agreement, signed in last October, days before she was chosen as a candidate with 92% of the votes in a primary in which the opposition showed its mobilization muscle.

The Venezuelan Government disqualified her as soon as she began to lead the polls and has also prevented the registration of academic Corina Yoris, whom Machado, in consensus with the Unitary Platform, designated as a substitute to face Maduro. He has also imprisoned some of his closest collaborators, as part of the maneuvers deployed to prevent the July election from being a free and competitive election.

Without being able to leave Venezuela, as it has been banned for several years, this week the leader has dedicated herself to sending letters to the presidents of at least 18 countries: Germany, Argentina, Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Spain, United States, France, Honduras, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, United Kingdom, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, South Africa, as well as the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Policy, Josep Borrell; and the prime minister of the Kingdom of Norway, the country that facilitated the negotiations between Chavismo and the opposition.

Along these lines, Machado has not missed the opportunity to follow Musk's message, a personality at the antipodes of Chavismo about whom, however, Maduro has joked: a few months ago, at a technology fair held in Caracas, he said that the Also the owner of companies like Tesla and SpaceX was his friend, who would visit Venezuela when he was interested in making investments and that the Starlink antennas – another of his companies – were already selling in the country for “very expensive.”

Among these exchanges of tweets, Crucial days are passing for Venezuela, where Chavismo has tightened the siege against the opposition with arrests and new legislation to control freedom of expression, association and assembly. The United States Government has called this week to comply with the electoral guarantees signed in Barbados. The head of the US mission to Venezuela, Eduardo Palmieri, reminded Maduro of the April 18 deadline, the date on which he must define whether or not to renew the oil licenses granted to the United States after the consensus achieved in last year's negotiations.

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