Venezuela opposition leader provides hope for many, even though she isn't on the presidential ballot

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Maria Corina Machado has hiked overpasses, walked highways, ridden motorcycles, sought shelter in supporters' homes and seen her closest collaborators detained and persecuted. She has held the calloused hands of crying men, worn dozens of gifted rosaries and listened to the pleas of the young and old while crisscrossing Venezuela.

The ruling party has blocked Machado from running in Sunday's hotly contested presidential election, but fueled by that ban, she has become the driving force for the main opposition coalition and a symbol of hope, courage and perseverance for millions of Venezuelans. Machado, once a political outcast, is their freedom fighter and the main threat to President Nicolás Maduro’s reelection aspirations.

Supporters scream “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” as she arrives at rallies and while she speaks, some overwhelmed to the point of tears. The thousands-strong crowds include opponents of the self-professed socialist revolution that Maduro’s predecessor began at the turn of the century, as well as voters who supported those ideals but abandoned them because of Venezuela's ongoing crisis.

Such is her power to commandeer millions of votes, that the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela has taken to intimidating Machado and her supporters. The government has arrested collaborators and closed businesses associated with her, from a hotel where she stayed during a campaign stop to women that sold empanadas to her from their homes. Her campaign manager has sheltered at an embassy in the capital, Caracas, for months.

And all this when the name Machado, her face and party do not appear on the ballot, while Maduro shows up 13 times.

Machado was cemented as leader of the Unitary Platform coalition — the main opposition faction — in October, when she won the presidential primary with more than 90% of the vote.

But Machado’s road to leadership has been long and winding. Just months before the primary, even some opposition members considered the free-market firebrand a radical because of her unwillingness to negotiate with Maduro’s government and her harsh criticism of those who did. As recently as 2021, she urged voters to boycott elections, arguing that their participation in an uneven playing field implicitly legitimized the ruling party.

The industrial engineer and daughter of a steel magnate began challenging the ruling party in 2004, when the non-governmental organization she co-founded, Súmate, promoted a referendum to recall then-President Hugo Chávez. The initiative failed, and Machado and other Súmate executives were charged with conspiracy.

A year later, she drew the anger of Chávez and his allies again for traveling to Washington to meet President George W. Bush in the Oval Office. Chávez considered Bush an adversary.

She formally entered the political arena in 2010 when she was elected to a seat in the National Assembly, receiving more votes than any aspiring lawmaker ever. It was from this position that she boldly interrupted Chávez as he addressed the legislature and called his expropriation of businesses theft.

“An eagle does not hunt a fly,” he responded. The exchange is seared in voters’ memories.

Machado is a “symbol of resistance to the regime,” said Michael Shifter, an academic and former president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank. Her efforts to challenge the ruling party have earned her the admiration of many voters who see her as the “instrument for a transformation in Venezuela,” Shifter said.

Machado, a 56-year-old mother of three, revealed her presidential aspirations two years later. She came third in the race to be the presidential candidate for the Democratic Unity Roundtable. The former governor of the northern state of Miranda, Henrique Capriles, represented the opposition coalition but lost to Chávez. When Chávez died of cancer in March 2013, Maduro was installed as interim president, and he beat Capriles in the subsequent election triggered by Chávez's death.

The ruling party-controlled National Assembly ousted Machado in 2014 and, months later, the Comptroller General's Office disqualified her from public office for a year citing an alleged omission from her asset declaration form. That same year, the government accused her of being involved in an alleged plot to kill Maduro. She denied the charge, calling it an attempt to silence her and opposition members who had called tens of thousands of people to the streets in protests that at times turned violent.

She kept a low profile for the next nine years; she supported some anti-Maduro initiatives and criticized opposition efforts to negotiate with the government. By the time she announced her bid for the presidency last year, her careful messaging had softened her image as an elitist hardliner, allowing her to connect with skeptics on both sides.

Days after she formally entered the Unitary Platform opposition coalition's primary, the Comptroller General's Office announced she was banned from running for office for 15 years, and the country's top court affirmed that decision in January. Far from stopping Machado's quest or diminishing voter support, she has used those challenges to connect with Venezuelans, many of whom find parallels between her difficulties and their everyday struggles.

The attacks on and the obstacles before Machado “have served to catapult her,” said Félix Seijas, director of the Venezuela-based polling firm Delphos, who described her as a “political phenomenon."

Her meteoric rise was also aided by the void left by other opposition leaders who fled into exile.

Since the presidential campaign officially began this month, Maduro, 61, has toughened his criticism of Machado, calling her a “decrepit old woman of the ideology of hate and fascism," and accusing her of wanting to “fill the country with hatred and violence.”

Unable to overcome the ban blocking her candidacy, Machado initially chose a college professor as her substitute on Sunday's ballot, but she too was banned from registering as a candidate. Machado eventually threw her support behind former diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, and they have campaigned together in recent months.

Thousands of their supporters gathered this month for a rally in the once thriving industrial city of Valencia. People cheered and chanted “Freedom! Freedom!” as they drove by atop a truck.

Among the rallygoers was Alejandro Veliz, 22, who said he would be driving elderly citizens to voting centers on Sunday. He sells homemade Chinese food on the street because he could not finish his associate degree due to economic challenges. His two brothers are among the more than 7.7 million Venezuelans who have emigrated in the last decade, and he wants a change in government so he doesn't have to leave too.

“People are tired of living under repression. They cut down trees (and) moved dirt to obstruct the passage of pedestrians, buses, even Maria Corina,” Veliz said referring to obstacles blocking access to the gathering. “People are tired.”