It is difficult to get more out of two days in Madrid. According to the schedule, during the days she will spend in the capital, opposition leader María Corina Machado has already met with two opposition leaders, Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Santiago Abascal; she received the Golden Key of Madrid from the mayor and this Saturday she will meet with Isabel Díaz Ayuso and give a massive rally to the Venezuelan community in the heart of the capital. Earlier, she was on Ana Rosa’s program on Telecinco, went to the hospital to see Edmundo González, and on Monday, she will be with Felipe González and participate in a breakfast with businessmen.
At the only press conference scheduled, the one she held this Saturday, Corina Machado justified not having met with Pedro Sánchez with a single phrase: “The statements from Barcelona confirm that this meeting should not have taken place.” It was her only response to a disagreement about which she had so far simply said “that it was not convenient.”
In front of the journalists and without naming them directly, María Corina criticized Pedro Sánchez and the other presidents gathered in Barcelona by saying that “there are actors who question, obstruct, and threaten the democratic process.” According to the Nobel Peace Prize winner, “at this moment there are those who want to maintain the status quo and those who want to move forward. To identify one or the other, just ask them when elections should be held in Venezuela,” she said. The Venezuelan leader’s team hinted that the recognition of Lula da Silva or Gustavo Petro to Delcy Rodríguez coming from the progressive summit had not gone down well.
In her response to more than thirty questions she received afterward, María Corina addressed most of the topics she is always asked about: her return to Venezuela, her relationship with Trump, the changes within her country, and her difficult relationship with the progressive leaders of the region. In this regard, she threw one of the few darts with names and surnames at Petro, when the president of Colombia suggested the formation of a coalition government between chavismo and the opposition in Venezuela. “When there were fraudulent elections in Venezuela, they wanted them to participate and now they fear the polls,” she criticized.
However, Corina Machado was more interested in focusing on the Venezuelan reality and the role of the Rodríguez siblings than in talking about Barcelona. “No one is naive about who these characters are. She is carrying out the orders that are sent to her,” she said about the acting president, Delcy Rodríguez. Regarding the Nobel, the Venezuelan leader insisted that she does not regret having given the medal to Trump: “No, I do not regret it, it is the mandate I received from Venezuelans with the sole objective of advancing a process.”
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“I am going to return to Venezuela and I am doing so in coordination with the United States,” she confessed to journalists who asked about her personal safety. “Recently, a Primero Justicia politician was detained again at the airport and that is also a message for me because they want me not to go ahead with my determination to return,” she said about her immediate future.
María Corina Machado, who spent 12 years unable to leave the country and 17 months in hiding, recounted the suffering of living separated from her children or her mother and described the struggle of Venezuelans as an “existential, ethical, and spiritual struggle where there is no room for equidistance or neutrality in the face of crime, violence, and evil,” she described. “There are only two positions: being with the regime or with Venezuelan society,” she insisted.
Regarding the decision to readmit Venezuela to the International Monetary Fund, Corina Machado said this requires transparency. “Finally, we want to know what the reserves, income, debts, or gold of the central bank are. This imposes an element of control on the economy and the regime is terrified of this.”
After only a few minutes into her speech, María Corina Machado had to interrupt her press conference with tears in her eyes to embrace Catalina Ramos, a former collaborator who was imprisoned for many months. As in all her appearances in Madrid, the opposition leader alternated her political messages with moments of great emotion, tears, and long hugs with exiled journalists, collaborators she reunited with after years apart, or former members of her party whom she stopped seeing overnight when they had to leave the country.
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