As you approach María Corina Machado's office, your cell phone loses signal.
Some guys with a vigilant attitude ride a motorcycle from corner to corner while others, grouped together, cautiously look at what is happening around them.
Don't let any detail escape them.
Let nothing get out of control: the all-seeing eye of the Chavista secret service.
The world that has been generated around the politics that Nicolás Maduro fears most is of a strange normality.
To finally reach her you have to pass an altar of virgins and candles from different places in the world that have been given to her by his followers;
a wall filled with caricatures and portraits of her;
the filter of her closest collaborators who take care of her like a treasure and, especially, she must overcome the siege imposed on her by a government determined not to let her be a presidential candidate.
We are talking about the woman who could dethrone a man who inherited power from Hugo Chávez in 2013, as if Venezuela were a monarchy, and who is willing to do anything to not let it be taken away from him.
Machado, disqualified from participating in the elections because she is in the hands of the ruling party, is going to attempt this feat through Corina Yoris, a prestigious 80-year-old academic to whom she has transferred her candidacy and the entire political capital of she.
The almost entire opposition has closed ranks around them.
There are two women who have Maduro in check, who knows that his country is like a hungry tiger: if you get off it, it will eat you.
And if he wins the elections again this June 28 - no matter how illegitimate they may be before the international community due to the Chavista repression of the last two months - he would stay in power for six more years, that is, at least until 2031. Chavismo would serve three decades in power and Maduro would surpass Chávez himself in years of governability.
María Corina says that, then, 3,000,000 million Venezuelans who have not yet left would leave Venezuela.
“It would be brutal if Maduro won again,” she says, sitting in front of me.
“The countries of Latin America and, above all, Colombia, would suffer from it because they would be the largest recipients of the migratory wave,” she explains.
And according to the International Organization for Migration, 7.2 million people have left Venezuela in recent years.
It is the most scandalous exodus on this side of the world and in these elections, if the opposition could compete with a minimum of guarantees, Maduro could really lose.
“For the first time, in 25 years, we are going to a presidential election where we are 80/20, no one doubts it.
There is competitiveness here and it would be a crushing victory for the regime, it would be a victory for the citizens,” she says.
The president of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro at a government event on March 19 in Caracas, Venezuela.EFE/Prensa Miraflores
Venezuelans who today are thirty-five years old or younger have not known a way of governing other than Chavismo and have grown up in a country of scarcity as if it were normal: buckets of water abound in homes and offices because the liquid rarely arrives. times in the week;
The electricity goes out intermittently during the day and that is why those who can pay for energy controllers so that their appliances do not burn out.
It is an oil country that went from producing 3,000,000 barrels a day to less than 1,000,000 today, and in which gasoline has been even cheaper than water, but in which the lines to fill the tank a car is fifteen, twenty blocks.
The Government has service stations where gasoline is subsidized and, of course, cheaper.
There are other non-subsidized stations with shorter lines and higher prices where gas is still cheaper than in any neighboring country.
Caracas is today a vibrant city, very different from before the pandemic when the opposition and the ruling party clashed furiously in the streets, food was scarce, the public force was the owner of the streets and it was impossible to buy a beer if one didn't have a hill of bolivars.
When it was a tinderbox city ready to explode all the time.
Now it's different.
The economy is completely dollarized and there is a lot of money because international economic sanctions make it difficult to get it out of Venezuela.
There is already food in supermarkets, merchandise in stores,
Ferraris
and
Lexuses
driving around the city without license plates, and expensive restaurants packed with people dressed in designer clothes spending in dollars as if they were in New York.
The Venezuelan capital moves at the pace of a great metropolis.
There are luxuries.
You don't see the old garbage in its streets nor is there fear of thieves for taking out your cell phone at night.
The friends and enemies of Chavismo no longer star in the frenetic marches that ended in violence, with murdered boys and unjust prisoners.
Now injustice has a priority: since January, María Corina has had seven of her closest collaborators arrested, accused of participating in conspiratorial acts, and seven more have arrest warrants.
She, sitting in her office where a photo of her children stands out, a wall with no more hanging rosaries, a flag of Venezuela and a sign that says
never give up
, the phrase immortalized by the former prime minister. British Winston Churchill as the Nazis bomb London, smiles kindly.
She breaks away for a moment from the persecution she is experiencing and asks if she looks okay.
If her clothes match.
If she is dressed up enough.
The situation is sad and tense and she does her best to make the moment feel as serene as possible.
He explains that this time, things are different.
“Venezuela changed, we Venezuelans changed, we are no longer afraid,” she says.
“A lady told me one day: 'María Corina, but what else are they going to take from me? If they already took my children from me, what else are they going to take from me?' We Venezuelans have set out to break down the barriers that the system had built because the first thing Chávez did was divide us: rich, poor, white, black, left, right, but that same thing has united us,” he adds.
From those times of so much struggle and so much repression, it is the only one that remains.
Antonio Ledezma, Juan Guaidó, Leopoldo López and Lilian Tintori left.
They persecuted them, tortured them, silenced them and, finally, they fled their country.
What remains is Henrique Capriles who does not have the electoral wealth of Machado and who has also been blurred by these ups and downs of a history full of infamies.
Although many insist that Venezuela's opposition is divided, María Corina assures that there is unity.
"What else do you want?
We held the primaries and they were impeccable, I got more than 90% of the votes, that is unity,” she explains.
She is a slim, pretty woman, 56 years old, who seems unfazed.
She speaks with her hands, looks into her eyes, emphasizes her words with the gestures on her face, swallows saliva every time a tear is about to come out, and repeats her convictions as if they were a mantra.
She is sure that she can remove Maduro from power: “The regime is weak, much weaker… it is cruder, more brazen and oppressive, and all of these are signs of her weakness.
They resort to violence because they have no other mechanisms to impose themselves.
“They lost all their social capacity and their ability to blackmail,” she says.
But all that solid temperament that he expresses falters hard when he talks about his children.
She has three.
She sees them once or twice a year because they had to leave Venezuela and she cannot visit them.
Each trip of theirs is a risk that the mother prefers to take very little.
“I haven't been able to leave the country for ten years.
I haven't been able to take a domestic flight for seven years.
I say that I don't know what my country looks like from the sky, but they made a big mistake because thanks to that they have made me experience Venezuela from the inside.
I know every road, every gap in the pavement, people recognize me,” she explains.
His children, who are the most important thing in his life - he says and reiterates - are his source of guilt and pain.
“I was the only mother who was not in my children's grades.
I begged the judge to let me leave Venezuela and he wouldn't let me.
I couldn't go and they have been the most difficult days of my life,” she remembers with a rasping voice and soaked eyes.
She is to blame for the absent mothers.
“If you are at work, you are not with your children.
If you are with your children, you are not fighting with your community.
We want to do everything and do it well.
Dealing with guilt has been very challenging,” she says.
She married businessman Ricardo Sosa before she was 20 and at 27 she already had three children.
“I told my friends not to get married and I ended up being the first to get married, because I fell in love,” she says.
She was destined to work in the business group of her father, who was president of the steel company Siderúrgica Venezolana SIVENSA, but she fell in love with her politics more than even her first husband.
Her story in politics began one day when her mother invited her to visit a correctional center for minors in Caracas and since then she became convinced that she could positively impact people.
“That changed my life,” she says.
She created the Atenea Foundation and what began as collateral work took over her daily life.
“Until that moment, I had not experienced so closely the reality of a human being who has no one,” she says.
María Corina Machado and Corina Yoris Villasana, whom she nominated to replace her as presidential candidate, during a press conference in Caracas, Venezuela, March 22, 2024.Gaby Oraa (REUTERS)
Since then, it has breathed politics.
She stopped being a wife when her lack of love entered her house and, over time, she became the girlfriend of a constitutional lawyer whom she met in one of his many campaigns.
It is a love built on admiration and loyalty.
“He is an exceptional being, we have lived through very complex moments,” she says.
She and he know the dangers they face.
It is difficult to understand why they have not imprisoned her in that country where impudence became customary.
The most viable explanation lies in the international community.
María Corina Machado is a very powerful symbol.
The only woman from that generation of brave men who retired, the absent mother and the exemplary daughter who these days is dealing with a sadness greater than that caused by Chavismo: the recent death of her father.
“It is a very big void, I didn't imagine I could live without it.
When he was there in those days she told him 'don't leave me alone.
Not right now'.
He was a visionary man who loved Venezuela and had a sense of responsibility for the country.
His death pushed me.
“He gave me more strength,” he says and swallows again to break down.
While he talks about his life and his desires, he combines the sadness with the few joys that these complex times have left him.
She reiterates his convictions.
Smile.
She takes a deep breath;
She pauses and talks again about the people, about her people, about her followers, about her broken Venezuela, about the mothers like her who have matured without her children, about the change she is in. obsessed with getting.
On the streets of Caracas, to everyone she asks, she answers in a whisper that she wants a change.
María Corina Machado is persecuted, but not tied up.
Corina Yoris carries the torch for her.
The world watches her movements with expectation and when one has her in front of her, her disbelief turns into a very rare confidence.
She is a mother who asks her god for her children to forgive her for the time she has not been able to be with them but she is, above all, a woman determined to make history.
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