Two decades have passed since María Corina Machado became known to the entire world. Venezuelan politics was the scourge of Chavismo, the first to call them a dictatorship, one of the few that told the powerful Hugo Chávez what he thought. It drove him crazy. “You called me a thief,” the Bolivian leader scolded him, out of his mind. Machado was recognized for being an iron lady, representing the radical wing and defending the toughest confrontation. She dreamed of blowing up Chavismo. There are still things about that politician who was 20 years younger, but she is no longer the one to whom hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have surrendered. The Machado who this Sunday swept more than 90% of the votes in the opposition primaries speaks of defeating Chavismo, but through the ballot box and with the help of God instead of that of the US army, with the force of the pain of being a mother separated from her three children, like so many in that Venezuela of young exiles.
This 55-year-old industrial engineer had never gotten along with a country further to the left of her postulates. Her figure garnered support among the upper class to which her family has always belonged and among the diaspora, but in recent months she became the closest thing to a town princess. The connection of his figure with the Venezuelans was not seen coming, but it has suddenly ended the hopelessness that had been installed for years in a society more concerned with surviving the day-to-day life of the economic crisis than defeating Chavismo. The failed strategies of the opposition in recent years did not take their toll on Machado, who had long distanced himself from almost all of his decisions, so it was not difficult for him to renew his name and his message.
Thousands of people have responded to his call from all parts of the country, from the richest to the poor, even among Chavismo’s voting grounds. Also abroad, where 7.7 million Venezuelans have emigrated in recent years. The disenchantment with the Government and with an opposition that had sown confusion by lurching so much, encouraged this woman with clear ideas, who seeks to give a complete turnaround to the country’s economy, and in the process connects with the pain of so many broken families with a very powerful message: she is also a mother who misses her children, but who decided to stay in Venezuela to fight to leave a better country for her own and others.
Chavismo tried to undermine the growth of an uncomfortable figure with the announcement last June of his disqualification from holding public office for 15 years, a legal trick denounced internationally and which relaunched his candidacy inside and outside the country for the primaries, but now It could be a brake on their electoral aspirations. In the agreements signed last week in Barbados between the Government and the opposition, it was agreed to authorize “all candidates and political parties,” but Chavismo has kept that possibility away from Machado. She, with much higher popularity ratings than Maduro’s, could seriously jeopardize the permanence of Chavismo in power if elections are held with all democratic guarantees.
To begin with, that is their closest horizon to subdue the Government. Machado defines herself and her party, Vente Venezuela, as “liberal” politically, economically and programmatically. Her political vision revolves around a reduction of the State as a provider of public policies, the launch of the possibilities of entrepreneurship and the promotion of the free market for the creation of wealth and job creation. Her vision of her government has a Manchesterian bias, not very different from what Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan or, in Latin America, Sebastián Piñera might have had. She looks at herself in those mirrors. “Margaret Thatcher had the courage to defend her values all her life against everything that opposed her,” she tweeted in 2013, perhaps in an allusion to herself, who still had a decade of neglect from Chavismo and the opposition ahead of her. before this victory.
Machado, and even more so now that he has brought together such diverse opponents under his name, joins that new political current of profiles that do not want to be ideologically labeled. “If proposing that the eradication of poverty is a responsibility of the entire society is a left-wing idea, then I am a left-wing one. If believing in personal freedom, in investment, in productivity is a right-wing issue, then I am right-wing,” she said in 2012. She has a tolerant and flexible stance on issues such as abortion, which she asks to open in the country the debate around its decriminalization in case of rape, the use of medical marijuana and defends gay marriage. Although she is a woman who presents herself as a believer, she denies that her faith will be reflected in her political action.
The opposition candidate has proposed privatizing the public company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), a taboo for local politics, and returning to their owners all the companies expropriated by Chavismo, among which is Siderúrgica Venezolana, the company of the that his father (who died this year) was president of the Executive Committee. Machado wants to deregulate controls, promises to punish corruption and promote a general amnesty for political prisoners, promote outward growth and resume contact with multilateral organizations.
With the influence of economists such as Ludwig Von Mises or Milton Friedman, he has an interpretation of local politics to the right of the traditional parties of Venezuelan democracy prior to Chavismo. A vision that is somewhat more American than European on the distribution of social funds to generate well-being and a deeply anti-communist discourse. Instead of the traditional social democratic promoter State of the 20th century, Machado proposes the reduction of welfare and the construction of a society without crutches to end the weight of the oil State in the lives of the population, where he collects an idea very present in Venezuelan thinkers, to whom he frequently refers, such as the novelist Arturo Uslar Pietri and the liberal intellectual Carlos Rangel.
Her attacks on Chavismo and her enmity with a large part of the opposition turned her into a solitary politician who now has the obligation to unite all those who want change and who, according to the mobilization in the primaries and popularity polls, are the majority. . Machado is sure that Chavista bases and opponents from all spectrums walk alongside her today, surrendered to her figure. His path to the presidential elections will depend on this popular support, the not always secure union of all the opposition parties and the pressure that Washington exerts on Caracas, in which he must get rid of the disqualification imposed by Chavismo if he wants to register his candidacy for 2024.
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