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The end of Nicolás Maduro’s vicious dictatorship, many people can agree, would be a good thing. Millions of Venezuelans certainly want it; various members of the Trump administration have said they want it, too. The European Parliament passed a resolution urging world leaders to support Venezuela’s opposition to Maduro as a “moral duty.” And yet, leaders of that opposition have felt the need to come up with a more persuasive message: Helping Venezuela’s democratic cause is not just about doing the right thing, they imply. It’s also a chance to make bank.
Last Thursday, members of the press were invited to a Gilded Age mansion in Manhattan for a presentation titled “A Trillion-Dollar Opportunity: The Global Upside of a Democratic Venezuela.” At the center of the event was María Corina Machado, the woman who campaigned for president of Venezuela last year and would very likely have won, had Maduro’s regime not banned her from running and then declared victory over her substitute in what a Washington, D.C.–based think tank called “the mother of all electoral frauds.” (The Organization of American States agrees that “electoral fraud” took place.)
On a videochat from her hiding place in Caracas, Machado told the audience, in English, “Today, Venezuela stands on the brink of a historic transformation.” She was referring to a democratic transition, which she expressed confidence would soon happen—and to “the immense wealth-generation potential” that this transition would unleash. “This opportunity extends beyond our borders,” she said. International investors would “benefit from unparalleled conditions starting on day one.”
What followed was not so much a press conference as a pitch to Wall Street. Sary Levy-Carciente, an economist on Machado’s team, took the microphone. Should the opposition come to power, “we are talking about 10 percent per year growth,” Levy-Carciente said, as aides handed out flyers listing sectors that would blossom under a hypothetical Machado-led government. These included tourism, where Venezuela is a “sleeping giant”; real estate, where “huge, huge profits” await; and, of course, fossil fuels, given that “Venezuela boasts the world’s largest oil reserves and the eighth-largest natural-gas reserves.” In 15 years, the money to be made from a democratic Venezuela—based on “conservative assumptions,” investors could rest assured—amounted to $1.7 trillion.
Machado’s team did not explicitly address the precondition for unlocking this bonanza: the end of a 26-year dictatorship whose leader doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. In the past year, Maduro has ramped up repression, disappeared prominent activists, and imprisoned even low-profile protesters. An atmosphere of fear has swept Venezuela. The presentation called for investment in a democratic Venezuela that doesn’t yet exist, without providing any guidance as to how exactly it was going to come into being. If Machado’s team had anyone in mind to facilitate this transition—say, someone in the Trump administration—no one said so.
Still, given that American financiers can do very little on their own to usher in the end of dictatorships in South America, Trump officials, if not Donald Trump himself, seemed to be the ultimate audience for the Machado team’s new message—suggesting a new perception, among Venezuelan opposition leaders, of what will move the Trump administration to help their cause.
During the first Trump administration, the notion that Washington might deliver Venezuela from Maduro didn’t seem all that far-fetched (and didn’t seem to require a profit motive). Trump often condemned Venezuela’s dictatorship. In front of an excited crowd of Venezuelans in Miami in 2019, the president proclaimed that Maduro’s days were numbered. He recognized Juan Guaidó, an opposition leader, as the interim president of Venezuela until the country could have free and fair elections. Dozens of nations around the world followed suit. The excitement fizzled out when it became clear that Maduro had no intention of relinquishing power, and Trump wasn’t willing or able to make him.
Since that time, the Venezuelan opposition has gotten stronger. Machado is much more popular than Guaidó, who emerged seemingly out of nowhere. Guaidó won Washington’s backing because he happened to fill a certain role—he was the majority leader of the legislature—at a moment when that put him in line for the presidency. But Machado has a face that every Venezuelan recognizes because she has dedicated more than 20 years to fighting the country’s dictatorship. She can rally crowds in the most remote parts of Venezuela. Even so, the second Trump administration appears to be more interested in deporting Venezuelans from America than in supporting a politician who could make Venezuela more livable. Gone are the days when Trump vowed to apply “maximum pressure” on Maduro.
[Read: Venezuela passed the torch, even if Maduro didn’t]
I had a chance to ask Machado, just a couple weeks after Inauguration Day this year, what she expected from the new Trump administration. She said that she thought Trump would understand helping the Venezuelan opposition as a matter of “national security and hemispheric security,” given the regional threats posed by the Venezuelan government. Maduro, after all, was the reason for the migrant outflows; he has also tolerated the rise of Tren de Aragua, the criminal gang Trump so frequently references. She didn’t mention anything about economic interests.
Machado had worked out a theory for how regime change could come about in Venezuela. If other countries exerted sufficient pressure on Maduro’s government, she suggested, the “cost of preserving the status quo” would go up. Top officials would eventually figure that their interests were better served by negotiating an exit deal with the opposition. That’s why she supported American sanctions on Venezuela, regardless of what American think tanks and academics had to say about the pain they inflicted on Venezuelans. “Sanctions to those who violate human rights harm the Venezuelan people?” Machado scoffed. “What really harms the people is a criminal government that intentionally brought down our productive apparatus.”
Machado does have one ally in the Trump administration: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who recently praised her as “the personification of resilience, tenacity, and patriotism.” In November 2022, President Joe Biden issued a license to allow the oil company Chevron to evade sanctions in order to extract oil in Venezuela. Rubio has called this a “pro-Maduro” gift and pushed to let it expire. Unfortunately, for Machado at least, Rubio is not the only person in Washington trying to set policy on Venezuela. Trump’s presidential envoy, Richard Grenell, appears to think that America stands to benefit from having a transactional relationship with Maduro. Shortly after the inauguration, Grenell traveled to Caracas to urge Maduro to accept deportation flights, and Maduro agreed to free six Americans detained in Venezuela. Grenell and Maduro shook hands and smiled for the camera—not exactly the “maximum pressure” Trump once promised to put on Maduro.
Late last month, as the Chevron license’s expiration date approached, Rubio and Grenell duked it out online. Grenell met with Maduro officials in the Caribbean, then went on a podcast to announce that the license would be extended–only for Rubio to contradict him the next day on X, where the secretary of state announced that the license would expire as scheduled. Eventually, the Trump administration settled on a compromise, extending the license but making it more restrictive. Observers have since talked about Rubio and Grenell as leaders of two competing factions within the Trump administration: the principled Venezuela hawks versus the pragmatists willing to make deals with Maduro.
[Read: The price of humiliating Nicolás Maduro]
Now Machado appears to be trying to reconcile both sides. And she has a message for the pragmatists: Working with us will bring more financial benefits than dealing with Maduro.
The stance has required an awkward bit of pragmatism from Machado herself. Her team has publicly urged the Trump administration not to revoke the protected status the Biden administration extended to Venezuelan immigrants. But Machado has also spoken in favor of deporting Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador, without questioning the Trump administration’s allegations that the Venezuelans it deported were, in fact, gang members. When I asked a question about this at the press conference, a moderator demurred, saying that such “political questions” would be answered at the end and asking if there were any more questions regarding the economic plan proposed.
In a profile for The Spectator last July, the writer Paola Romero described Machado as mixing “the crowd-pulling allure of Evita Peron with the politics of Margaret Thatcher.” Those are indeed the two Machados: one who tours her country to bring consoling messages of hope to Venezuela’s poorest, and another who wears a pantsuit and jewels and praises the merits of free markets and privatization. Last year, Machado’s presidential campaign was mostly Evita. The press conference was all Thatcher.
In her closing remarks, Machado said that the interests of “the people of Venezuela, democratic governments in the Western Hemisphere, and certainly investors” were all aligned. “This is a win-win situation.”
Article originally published at The Atlantic
