Venezuela is still firmly in the grip of a socialist dictatorship. But the country's popular opposition leader hopes to hasten the regime’s fall — in part by selling Venezuela’s big capitalist potential.
María Corina Machado is in hiding from the regime in Venezuela. But Thursday morning she appeared on a Zoom videoconference, hosted by the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, touting a major economic plan for post-dictatorship Venezuela.
Machado said the program, which includes privatizing Venezuela’s state-owned oil reserves — the world's largest — could bring $1.7 trillion dollars in foreign investment to the country by 2040. And she stressed the Venezuelan diaspora, most of whom live in South Florida, will be key.
Referring to the myriad drug-trafficking, money-laundering and other indictments Venezuelan leaders face in countries like the U.S., Machado declared that “we’ll transform Venezuela from the criminal hub of the Americas to the energy hub of the Americas...
"Our greatest asset is 8 million Venezuelans abroad ready to return, invest and rebuild.”
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The problem, as Machado herself acknowledged, is that Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro — who stole last year’s presidential election after vote tallies showed he lost by a landslide to opposition candidate Edmundo González — remains entrenched in power.
Venezuela analysts tell WLRN one aim of Machado's economic vision, aside from laying out a road map for rescuing the country from its humanitarian crisis — the worst in modern South American history — is to motivate potential U.S., European and other investors to lobby President Donald Trump to put more pressure on Maduro to step down.
“The regime is more vulnerable than ever" Machado argued during her AS/COA presentation. "The system is collapsing ... a sinking ship.”
Machado claims that voter turnout in Venezuela's regional elections last month, which most of the opposition boycotted, was less than 15% — which she described as massive defiance of the regime.
Trump, meanwhile, did recently re-tighten oil sanctions against Venezuela.
Still, it’s unclear just how vulnerable Maduro’s regime really is.
Either way, Machado and other Venezuelan advocates claimed their economic plan could raise Venezuela's imploded crude production from less than 1 million barrels per day currently to 4.7 million in 15 years, bringing in revenue of $420 billion. They insist it can more than triple the country's GDP from little more than $100 billion today to $350 billion by 2040.
Importantly, they add, it seeks to reduce Venezuela's historically onerous reliance on oil and promote long neglected sectors including tourism, agriculture and tech.
