COMMENTARY Landslide opposition primary winner María Corina Machado needs to acknowledge that her suddenly potent chances of ousting Venezuela's dictatorship resulted from patient negotiation.
It’s an understatement to call María Corina Machado’s apparent victory in Sunday’s Venezuelan opposition presidential primary commanding. She may claim more than 90% of the votes cast inside Venezuela — and around the world by the country’s swelling diaspora.
It would be just as big an understatement, though, to call Machado’s triumph ironic.
Not that long ago, Machado, a conservative and patently gutsy former congresswoman, was one of the opposition hardliners who scoffed at negotiations with Venezuela’s socialist dictator, Nicolás Maduro. Those talks were meant to get Maduro to agree to conditions for a more fair and transparent presidential election in 2024 than the fraudulent farce he “won” in 2018.
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The primary election Machado swept this week likely would not have happened if not for those sit-downs — and her chances of even being allowed to run in next year’s general election, let alone a fair shake at defeating Maduro, would look lower right now than the number of barrels Venezuela’s wrecked oil industry produces.
But when much of the opposition opted for negotiation two years ago — including Juan Guaidó, whom the U.S. and almost 60 other countries recognized then as Venezuela’s constitutionally legitimate president — Machado derided it as a waste of time. Her obstinance echoed the petulant boycott she led against parliamentary elections in 2005, which gifted the National Assembly to Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, the late Hugo Chávez.
“The only negotiation we’ll accept is for a transition, not a transaction,” Machado said in 2021, insisting the only point of discussion should be how and when Maduro and his thug regime would leave power. Guaidó, she added for good measure, had become a squishy tyrant appeaser.
It was a defiant stance that most of the Venezuelan expat leadership here in South Florida — folks who don’t actually have to live under Maduro’s brutal and disastrous rule anymore — roaringly applauded.
It was also a quixotic if not delusional posture.
Without the dialogue Machado once ridiculed, the U.S. might not even be in a position now to demand Maduro allow her on next year's presidential ballot.
That’s because Maduro wasn’t going anywhere. Despite having engineered Venezuela’s catastrophic economic collapse, he looked more entrenched in power then than he’d been in 2019.
You’ll recall that was the year the Trump Administration declared Guaidó Venezuela’s genuine head of state because of Maduro’s illicit 2018 re-election. It was also when then President Trump started slapping heavy sanctions on Venezuela’s state-run oil monopoly — and began blustering nonsense that a U.S. military invasion of Venezuela was “on the table.”
Pushing and cajoling
Even so, Venezuela’s drug-trafficking military remained behind Maduro. So it was obvious that the diplomatic leverage of the Guaidó designation and the economic sting of the de facto oil embargo, as potent as they were, had to be accompanied by firm but realistic — and, yes, frustrating — dialogue with the regime. Trump was far too addicted to instant gratification to invest that sort of long-term effort. But by 2021, even Guaidó had come to acknowledge the need for engagement.
He was, in fact, just the latest to see that’s usually, if not always, the case when you’re trying to pressure autocrats off the throne. It was true, say, in 1990, when that combo of pushing and cajoling led to elections that dislodged Chile’s right-wing despot, Augusto Pinochet, and his left-wing counterpart in Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega (though the latter, tragically, returned to power).
Now Venezuela could — could — be headed in the same direction. Last week, as a result of the negotiations Machado once ridiculed, and in return for an easing of the U.S. oil sanctions, Maduro agreed to electoral reforms that could — could — make him vulnerable in next year’s presidential race.
This, of course, is still the Maduro regime. Undoubtedly spooked by Machado’s massive primary win, it now insists, without proof, her election was tainted by “fraud.” Earlier this year, the regime banned Machado from running for political office because of bogus “corruption” charges against her. This week the Biden Administration is warning Maduro, as it certainly should, that it will re-apply the oil sanctions if he doesn’t allow Machado on the 2024 general election ballot.
But the point Machado needs to appreciate is that without the “transaction” she so short-sightedly opposed, the U.S. might not even be in a position to make that demand.
No one denies Machado’s uncommon courage. What Venezuelans need as much from her now, however, is common sense.
