Machado is the people's choice. (Carlos Becerra/Getty Images)
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Despite being the most popular politician in Venezuela, María Corina Machado has been banned from standing in this weekend’s election. Forbidden from flying, she must rely on cars and motorcycles — even canoes, horses and tractors when the roads are deliberately blocked — to criss-cross the country for campaigning. She is kept off most of the media. Her rallies have been attacked. Her aides and supporters have been beaten, detained or forced to flee into friendly embassies.
Machado endures all of this in the hope of forcing out a thuggish regime that preaches socialism while pillaging the state, sparking economic meltdown, mass hunger and the world’s worst displacement crisis. “Last week, we went to the state of Apure and we stopped to have breakfast,” Machado said when I heard her speak last month. “A couple of hours later the regime sent officials to close this tiny restaurant on the route. If we stay in hotels when we travel around the country, they are closed for several months. Many of the people who give us sound, move us around on buses are searched at their homes and their trucks or equipment are detained, for months sometimes.”
Little wonder this 56-year-old woman, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, has been nicknamed the Iron Lady. As she admits, it will be tough to defeat one of the world’s most repulsive regimes — and there have been previous false dawns. If the elections were fair, her rival President Nicolás Maduro would be ousted along with his gangster pals in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela after overseeing the impoverishment of an oil-rich nation and driving out 7.7 million citizens — one-fifth of the population. The polls suggest the opposition has more more than twice the support of the ruling party. But they are taking on a government with a record of electoral fraud and frustrating democracy.
So Machado plans to mobilise hundreds of thousands of supporters to monitor all the polling stations during Sunday’s vote, which is being held after a deal was brokered last year in Barbados for fair elections in return for lifting United States sanctions and allowing in some outside observers. “We are not naive knowing what the regime will do,” she told fellow dissidents attending the Oslo Freedom Forum. “We’ve been facing persecution, violation of human rights. But the regime is weaker and weaker every day. They have totally lost their social base and at the same time the networks they use for terror in the population are breaking down.”
Last October, the charismatic Machado — a conservative former parliamentarian who once called for outside intervention to save her country — won a massive majority in the opposition’s primary contest. But after one survey found she was backed by more than two-thirds of voters with Maduro languishing on 8%, officials disqualified her from running for public office for 15 years on grounds of supporting sanctions. But she remains the driving force behind Venezuela’s united opposition. Machado and her substitute candidate, former ambassador Edmundo González, have been drawing big crowds to rallies despite all the efforts to disrupt their campaign. Such is the disillusionment over the country’s economic collapse and desperate desire to reunite families divided by the mass exodus of citizens, they claim they can win power against the odds.
Analysts compare Machado’s popular appeal, energising the opposition and rousing people out of apathy, with the rise of her arch-enemy Hugo Chávez in the Nineties — although her mission is rooted in despair rather than Marxist ideology. The flamboyant former army colonel, who led a failed coup in 1992, took office seven years later by harnessing public anger over corruption, inequality and nepotism. Then his socialist party machinery strangled democratic institutions such as the civil service, courts and press, while his cronies plundered state coffers. Chávez’s former finance minister estimated they stole $300 billion before their leader’s death in 2013, when he was replaced by Maduro.
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SubscribeGod speed. What courage.
At some point Progressive Writers need to evaluate the track record of Marxist and Socialist Parties and stop calling the end result “Autocracy” all the time.
Collectivist Left Wing Movements always produce counterrevolution “Authoritarian” governments because the Collectivists don’t safeguard private property rights. You can’t have a functioning system when a government can just arbitrarily seize and redistribute all your assets just for opposing the Regime.
The Regime that follows the failed collectivization always has all the authoritarian tools at its disposal. The “Egalitarian” movement codifies a bunch of “common good” rules that actually just serves the Commisars. So why would the next movement be any different if your Constitution or legal system isn’t committed to equal justice.
A functioning system tries really hard not to be arbitrary.
For one moment, i read your “Egalitarian” as “Eagleton” – the very same Eagleton of this platform. Somehow, they seemed interchangeable.
the author refers to ‘these left-wing internationalists’ as if there was a wide network or something. There’s Venezuela, there’s Cuba, and …..that’s it.
I’m not much of a feminist but, in honor of women like Machado, I think it may be time to change the Spanish expression for daring bravery, cojones, to ovarios.