"THIS IS A STRUGGLE BETWEEN GOOD AND BAD."

After Venezuela quashed dissent, opposition leader María Corina Machado went underground. In a rare interview from hiding, she shares why she's not giving up.

- BY FERNANDA SANTOS

Machado led a protest for a fair vote count in Caracas in August 2024, a month after the disputed presidential election.

María Corina Machado has barely felt the sun on her skin in 14 months. She has seen thousands of people on screens, but except for one perilous, brief moment, hardly anyone face-to-face. She has been in hiding since the days following Venezuela's presidential election, when authorities loyal to Nicolás Maduro, the country's autocratic leader, declared he had won a third term. Machado refused to retreat-refused to accept the results of an election that has been called tainted, fraudulent, and deeply flawed; a contest whose outcome, in the words of former U.S. Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken, “does not reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people.”

Machado, who turns 58 this month, is a mother, an industrial engineer by trade, and a political force by virtue of her unbending determination to restore democracy to Venezuela. Never mind that she has been stripped of her seat in the National Assembly, one that she won with a record number of votes in 2010. Never mind that she has been physically attacked, accused of treason, and alleged to have conspired in a plot to assassinate Maduro—all attempts to silence her.

Never mind that the government barred her from registering as a candidate in the general presidential election after she won the primary in 2023 with 92 percent of the vote.

Machado promoted Edmundo González Urrutia, a former diplomat and political novice, to run in her place, and post-election, he has been recognized by the United States and the European Parliament as Venezuela's rightful leader. But after Maduro declared himself the winner and issued a warrant for his arrest, González fled to Spain last September. Maduro then declared that Machado, too, had left the country, calling them both "cowards" during televised remarks.