Venezuela’s ‘Iron Lady’ Pleads With Trump to Save Her Country’s Democracy

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 Mr. Maduro in July, Ms. 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, Ms. 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, Mr. 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 percent of polling stations.

The tallies, they said, showed that Mr. González had garnered almost 70 percent of the vote. (Fearing for his freedom, Mr. González, 75, fled to Spain in September.)

Ms. Machado argued that Venezuela now offers something extremely tempting to President-elect Donald J. Trump: “an enormous foreign policy victory in the very, very short term.”

In her view, Mr. Maduro is now so weak — rejected by his own people, suffering fractures within his party — that a renewed pressure campaign by Mr. 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 Mr. Biden and the pursuit of new criminal charges against Mr. Maduro’s allies.

She praised Mr. Trump’s selection of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida for secretary of state, and Representative Mike Waltz of Florida for national security adviser, positions that will be key in defining U.S. policy toward Venezuela.

Mr. Rubio, whom Ms. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Maduro, who labeled Mr. 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 Ms. Machado believes this moment is different. Mr. 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, Mr. González.

Ms. Machado has yet to speak to either Mr. Rubio or Mr. Waltz after their nominations, but said that their teams and hers were in “permanent contact.”

While many analysts say the recent election laid bare Mr. 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.”

In Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Maduro characterized the U.S. president as imperialist enemy No. 1. But in the days since Mr. Trump won a second term, Mr. Maduro has tried to curry favor, publicly expressing hope that the two could work together.

Mr. Maduro clearly needs the United States to lift sanctions, while Mr. Trump, who has vowed to undertake mass deportations, could use the Venezuelan leader’s help in making good on his promise.

Speaking recently on one of his talk shows, Mr. Maduro called for a new moment of “win-win” relations.

It is unclear if the Maduro government knows Ms. Machado’s location.

“It’s difficult to believe they don’t know,” said Laura Dib, a Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America.

“My read is that they know the political cost of imprisoning her,” Ms. Dib went on, “and instead they are betting on wearing her down.”

Many opposition leaders have come and gone in Venezuela over the years; few have built as broad a coalition as Ms. Machado. The eldest daughter in a prominent steel business family, she has spent roughly two decades trying to remove Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, from power.

In 2002 she founded a voter rights organization, Súmate, which pushed unsuccessfully to oust Mr. 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 Ms. Machado emerged as the leader of the Venezuelan opposition. When Mr. Maduro’s government barred her from running in the general election, she managed to get Mr. 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.

Ms. Machado declined to say whether she even could go outside. “It’s a difficult test,” she said of isolation.

Mr. González, now in Spain, has focused on pushing their cause in meetings with European leaders.

In the interviews, Ms. Machado’s voice often quickened to a near-panic pace, and she expressed frustration that some nations were not doing more to isolate Mr. 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 post-election crackdown by the Maduro government, according to the watchdog group Foro Penal. Among them are some of Ms. 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?”

In calling on Mr. Trump to help restore her nation’s democracy, Ms. Machado is appealing to a U.S. president-elect who still refuses to recognize the result of an election he lost in his own country in 2020.

But Ms. Machado said she is also emphasizing that pushing out Mr. Maduro is in the U.S.’s interest “in terms of hemispheric security,” she said. Mr. Maduro is a major ally of Russia, Iran and China.

Asked how long she can remain in hiding, Ms. Machado said that she was “working to make it as short as possible,” and hoped that all Venezuelans would soon be “reunited in freedom.”

“But I am willing to do what has to be done,” she said, “for as long as it takes to assert the truth and popular sovereignty.”

Isayen Herrera contributed reporting.