María Corina Machado had been outside the strategy of the Venezuelan opposition for some time.
The politics of the most radical wing of the right had become one of the most critical voices against the movements of the democratic forces in recent years.
That counter position could benefit you now.
The crisis in which the opposition finds itself, even more confused after the end of the so-called interim government in December, has placed Machado at the head of the polls for the primaries to be held in October.
A key appointment from which she will emerge the candidate who will face Nicolás Maduro in the 2024 presidential elections.
The founder of the Vente Venezuela party has been in these years the most visible head of the most intransigent sector of anti-Chavismo.
She has refused to enter into political negotiations with the Bolivarian leadership;
she has not wanted to formalize alliances with specific sectors of the opposition arguing ethical reservations;
and she has maintained an irreducible speech in defense of private property.
She usually calls members of the official political class “criminals” and she seems convinced that it will be impossible to achieve a return to democratic legality without resorting to force at some point.
Chavismo, as is to be expected, hates her with special bitterness (it has raised several legal files against her and imposed a ban on her leaving the country), although Nicolás Maduro has decided to ignore her in recent years.
For the rank and file Chavista militant, Machado is the ambassador of US interests and the upper classes.
She also collects antagonisms in the softer sectors of the opposition, mostly inclined to negotiate some demands with Maduro in exchange for certain improvements and stability.
However, a coherent discourse over time has now earned the sympathy of many people.
María Corina Machado (Caracas, 1967) is an industrial engineer and has a specialization in Finance at the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración, IESA, the most important business school in the country.
The eldest of four sisters, she is divorced and has three children, who live abroad.
She maintains a sentimental relationship with the lawyer Gerardo Fernández.
She belongs to a family with a long local lineage.
Her father, Henrique Machado Zuloaga, who has just passed away, was an important businessman in the metallurgical sector, and her family was the founder of the old Electricidad de Caracas, one of the great national capital corporations of the 20th century.
The Machado family companies, particularly the Sivensa and Sidetur steel companies, have been expropriated and destroyed by the Chavista administration.
Her mother, Corina Parisca,
The former deputy at the Vente Venezuela headquarters in Caracas. Andrea Hernandez Briceno (Bloomberg)
Machado has been one of the Venezuelan politicians who has most methodically cultivated an openly anti-communist discourse.
This has allowed him to attract many followers from the Venezuelan diaspora.
On social networks, her positions are defended by the wild expressions of the national right, the so-called "Magazolanos".
In 2012 she founded a party, Vente Venezuela, and tried to give it programmatic foundations: market economy, minimal State, social guarantees, privatization, business leadership, with a nationalist discourse that is deeply rooted in the traditional upper classes in the country.
Sometimes characterized as the expression of "the Venezuelan ultra-right," Machado's speech does not have a religious bias, nor does it foster prejudice, nor does it stigmatize minorities or raise conservative arguments in the social field.
Although it is true that some of his followers do.
"She doesn't really like being contradicted," says a source who was close to her.
“He has a lot of magnetism and personal charms in conversation.
She is very disciplined, demanding, but respectful.
She is surrounded by a group of activists who greatly admire her.
Young leaders who have fully consumed her postulates."
In recent times, he has been getting rid of his elegant clothes to walk almost permanently in jeans and tennis shoes, with a T-shirt with the logo of his party, visiting popular towns and neighborhoods.
She has a very wide smile, habitual in her private conversations.
Behind her polite manners there is an iron epicenter, a kind of steel liquefied: a person with a very strong character, rigid in her interpretations, with a predestined vision of herself, who privileges personal value as an attribute.
A person who has a hard time giving up their positions and negotiating.
Machado has deteriorated relations with most of the important leaders of the current Venezuelan opposition.
Her critics accuse her of entangling the unitary agreements by making proposals that are impossible to execute and of undermining popular confidence in voting for their own benefit.
In 2010, she was elected deputy with a high vote.
In 2004, he founded Súmate, a body that meant his entry into public life and which became a well-known NGO linked to the opposition, famous for its comptroller position in the early years of Hugo Chávez.
For a long time, she has been close to Germán Carrera Damas, historian and prominent intellectual, as one of his mentors.
She also attends to the advice of Carlos Blanco, economist and opposition politician, former minister in the 90s.
"He was clear from very early on what the true face of the Chavista regime is, as was later evidenced, in the 2017 crisis, that must be recognized," says a well-known financial analyst who now sympathizes with his postulates.
“We tended to see her as someone who sabotaged opposition unity.
And no, she knew what some opposition politicians were up to, the deals with Chavismo, the corruption.
She didn't approve.
There she has a whole point in favor ”.
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