By Christopher F. Schuetze, Jim Tankersley and Rosanne Kropman
She galvanized a nation to oust Venezuela’s autocrat at the ballot box, spending months surrounded by people and filling avenues with supporters who risked beatings and arrest just to hear her speak.
Now, with President Nicolás Maduro accused of stealing the election and his government threatening her capture, María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s wildly popular opposition leader, has gone into hiding — alone.
In a series of rare, in-depth virtual interviews since she mobilized millions to vote against Maduro in July, Machado said she was holed up in a secret location somewhere inside her country. Because anyone who helps her could be detained — or might lead government agents to her — she said she has not had a visitor in months.
Nicknamed the country’s “Iron Lady” for her conservative politics and steely resolve, Machado is, she admitted, “longing for a hug.”
Her mother has urged her to meditate. She has not.
Instead, the former lawmaker is working around the clock, taking virtual meetings with foreign ministers and human rights organizations, urging them to remember that a broad coalition of nations acknowledge that her chosen candidate, Edmundo González, won the July vote by a wide margin and should be taking office in January.
Just hours after the election, Maduro declared victory, but he released no evidence to back up his claim. In response, the Machado team collected and published vote-tally receipts from more than 80% of polling stations.
The tallies, they said, showed that González had garnered almost 70% of the vote. (Fearing for his freedom, González, 75, fled to Spain in September.)
Machado argued that Venezuela now offers something extremely tempting to President-elect Donald Trump: “an enormous foreign policy victory in the very, very short term.”
In her view, Maduro is now so weak — rejected by his own people, suffering fractures within his party — that a renewed pressure campaign by Trump and his allies could in fact push the Venezuelan autocrat to negotiate his own exit.
This pressure campaign, she said, could include reversing the sanctions relief put in place by President Joe Biden and the pursuit of new criminal charges against Maduro’s allies.
She praised Trump’s selection of Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida for secretary of state, and Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida for national security adviser, positions that will be key in defining U.S. policy toward Venezuela.
Rubio, whom Machado has known for more than a decade, has staked his political career in part on a no-compromises approach to leftist authoritarians in Latin America.
He was an architect of Trump’s previous policy toward Venezuela, a so-called maximum pressure campaign that involved broad sanctions on the country’s vital oil industry and support for a young legislator, Juan Guaidó, who claimed to be the country’s interim president.
The approach failed to oust Maduro, who labeled Guaidó a U.S. puppet, and some analysts argue that it even strengthened the autocrat, showing that he could withstand an all-out offensive from the world’s most powerful nation.
But Machado believes this moment is different. Maduro is financially broken, she said, has alienated key allies like President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and has lost so much public support that he has been forced to launch his most brutal repression campaign yet to stay in power.
Perhaps even more relevant, the Venezuelan people, she said, were now largely united behind a democratically elected president, González.
Machado has yet to speak to either Rubio or Waltz after their nominations, but said that their teams and hers were in “permanent contact.”
While many analysts say the recent election laid bare Maduro’s weaknesses, few believe the autocrat, who is being investigated for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court and could face arrest if ousted, has much incentive to leave.
“She says, ‘Maduro has no choice, he has to negotiate,’” said Phil Gunson, an analyst with International Crisis Group who has been based in Venezuela for more than two decades. “I think he does have a choice, and his choice is to remain in power.”
Many opposition leaders have come and gone in Venezuela over the years; few have built as broad a coalition as Machado. The eldest daughter in a prominent steel business family, she has spent roughly two decades trying to remove Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, from power.
In 2002 she founded a voter rights organization, Súmate, which pushed unsuccessfully to oust Chávez through a recall vote. Súmate received U.S. funding.
It is only recently, after an overwhelming victory in a primary race in 2023, that Machado emerged as the leader of the Venezuelan opposition. When Maduro’s government barred her from running in the general election, she managed to get González on the ballot in her stead.
On the campaign trail, she was received almost as a religious figure, often wearing white, promising to restore democracy and reunite families torn apart by an economic crisis and mass migration.
“María!” her followers shouted, before falling into her arms.
In hiding these days, she wakes up alone, cooks and ponders the future of the country alone. Her three adult children live abroad; it is unclear when she will see them again. When she appears in videos shared online, she uses a blank white background, an effort, perhaps futile, to conceal her location.
Machado declined to say whether she even could go outside. “It’s a difficult test,” she said of isolation.
González, now in Spain, has focused on pushing their cause in meetings with European leaders.
In the interviews, Machado’s voice often quickened to a near-panic pace, and she expressed frustration that some nations were not doing more to isolate Maduro.
“We Venezuelans did everything the international community asked of us,” she said, a reference to the millions of people who risked retaliation to vote for her movement. “Now it’s time for the international community to do its part.”
Nearly 2,000 people have been imprisoned in a postelection crackdown by the Maduro government, according to the watchdog group Foro Penal. Among them are some of Machado’s closest advisers. At least two people have died after being taken into custody and another two dozen people were killed amid protests just after the July vote. The youngest, Isaías Fuenmayor, was just 15.
That so many people are suffering after supporting her weighs heavily.
“How many more deaths?” she asked, her voice rising. “How many more disappearances?”