Many Venezuelans shout to María Corina Machado on the street: “I enable you with my vote.” And that is what this liberal politician clung to during the opposition primary campaign, which on Sunday swept the polls with more than 90% of the support. The citizens kept her word and elected her to be the opposition candidate to face Nicolás Maduro in the 2024 presidential elections, in primaries that were a success despite all the difficulties. “Here the people of Venezuela are the enablers,” Machado often says, within the forms of politics, which involve believing the discourse and defending it to the end. But if Chavismo is in front, everything changes. Here the author is Maduro and, for now, the politician who won the primaries is prohibited from holding public office for 15 years. She cannot, for example, register as a candidate for 2024, what she was elected for yesterday.
To understand the sentence imposed on Machado, it is good to know some data. Since 2002, Chavismo has disqualified more than 1,400 citizens from holding public office, according to the NGO Acceso a la Justicia, many of them public officials. Among them are some of the best-known opposition leaders or those with the most popular support. The Maduro Government, with tight control over all the country’s institutions, seeks with this legal trick to neutralize its opponents. Leopoldo López or Henrique Capriles were the subject of controversial judicial decisions to leave them out of the political game, as Machado has now been.
The political persecution against the already elected candidate began in 2014. Then, Machado embodied the most radical wing of the Venezuelan opposition. Her direct encounters with Hugo Chávez are part of the country’s history. That year, Machado was dismissed from the National Assembly accused of “treason” for having agreed to join a Panamanian delegation in order to speak before the OAS General Assembly in Washington. In 2015, the Comptroller General of the Republic – the auditing body of the Citizen Power – disqualified her from holding public office for a year, just five months before the parliamentary elections, which Machado planned to attend.
The opponent then explained that the Comptroller’s Office disqualified her because she did not include in her sworn declaration of assets the payment of food bonuses, known as baskettickets. “They never gave me those baskettickets. That is why I did not include them in the document that I submit once a year,” he defended himself publicly. He didn’t care. Machado did not participate in those elections.
Since then and until today, the path of politics has gone through ups and downs of popularity. Faced with the opposition majority, due to her defense of a railway line of confrontation with Chavismo, Machado has gone more or less unnoticed in recent years. She distanced herself from the postulates of the majority of democratic forces during the failed interim government of Juan Guaidó and opposed all the different attempts at dialogue with Chavismo to seek a negotiated solution. Since 2020, in addition, she defended that the electoral participation of the opposition legitimized Chavismo and she refused to participate. Now, in view of the lack of success of an end by force of the Government, a more moderate speech and the embrace again of the electoral path returned to Machado the brilliance lost for years.
In these months of campaigning for the primaries, politics managed to connect with a large part of a politically disoriented Venezuelan society, which saw in this woman the determination that so many times failed among an opposition that was always divided and hesitant about the best strategy to defeat Chavismo. Machado now promises to overthrow the Government democratically, participating in fair and free elections to which Chavismo, under pressure from the United States, committed just a week ago. It was in the midst of the glare of the campaign, when it began to be seen that Machado would have no rival in the primaries, that the judicial machinery of Chavismo got to work.
At the end of June, the Comptroller’s Office imposed a sanction that disqualified the politician from holding public office for 15 years. The decision was promoted by deputy José Brito, who is part of the so-called “scorpions” group that brings together former opponents of Nicolás Maduro now implemented by the Government. Brito was the one who asked the Comptroller’s Office to verify “the status” of the possible candidate for the 2024 presidential elections, which decided to disqualify her for 15 years after a “property investigation.” The entity explained that the sanction was due to failures in a sworn statement as a former deputy on the justification of some funds during the audited period. The same thing for which she had been disqualified in 2015 for 12 months, but whose punishment had now been decided to extend to 15 years. The Comptroller’s Office also accused her of being Guaidó’s accomplice in corruption schemes, although the politician was never part of the interim government, and criticized her for having defended United States sanctions against the Venezuelan economy. By then, the polls for the primaries already showed a fired-up Machado.
And so until today. Machado is now the virtual opposition candidate for the presidential election, but everything depends on the future of her disqualification. The agreements signed last week in Barbados between the Government and the opposition specify that in view of next year’s elections, authorization will be promoted “for all candidates and political parties”, but the Government has already moved away from the possibility of lifting the authorization. disqualification on Machado. After the success of Sunday’s primaries, with an estimated more than two million voters, the fight against disqualification begins, in which the popular support for Machado, the expected closing of ranks of the entire opposition with the candidate will have weight. elected and the pressure exerted by the United States.
The last word, in any case, goes to Maduro himself, who although he needs to keep the new stage of understanding open with Washington for the extension of the relief of sanctions on gas and oil, it is also clear that he has no intention to give up power. In view of the opposition mobilization on Sunday and the popularity ratings of the winner – much higher than those of the president – in free, fair elections, with international observation and Machado enabled, Maduro has everything to lose.
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