Life is busy for twenty-first century women, and Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado is no exception. There are a lot of plates to keep spinning—keeping track of adult children living abroad, exposing a rigged national election, preventing Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro from finding and imprisoning you. The usual daily grind.
She somehow pulls it off with style. According to Maduro, 62, Machado is “a decrepit old woman.” Yet when appearing in front of a cheering crowd on the street or in interviews from undisclosed locations with Telemundo or Fox News, she looks far younger than her 57 years.
With straight brown hair curving back over her shoulders, Machado radiates optimism and positivity, sometimes emphasizing points by bringing her palms together, prayer style. The fight she has waged for over twenty years proves that the lively, friendly eyes are backed by steel. But will this be enough to lead the Venezuelan people to unseat a socialist regime that has dominated daily life for two decades? Socialism is easier to get into than out of, something voters in the US should consider in the face of a rising cadre of political candidates embracing the label of “democratic socialist.” As Machado’s story demonstrates, in the long run, that may be a contradiction of terms.
Venezuela’s Spiral Into Poverty
Though never a paragon of political or economic freedom, the discovery of oil in 1914 and a broadly capitalist economy attracted foreign investment to Venezuela and made it Latin America’s wealthiest nation in the 1930s. In 1961, it became the first country to officially eradicate malaria. By 1976, the year President Carlos Andrés Pérez nationalized the oil industry into the state-run firm PDVSA, the capital city of Caracas was flowing with money and development. American-made cars rolled along modern boulevards. The Concorde made weekly stops at the Simón Bolívar International Airport. A middle class flourished.
But with the economy so tied to oil, the business cycle rose and fell on the price of crude, and Venezuela never truly recovered from the price collapse of the 1980s. Subsequent economic mismanagement created a toxic stew of inflation and poverty that socialist Hugo Chavez leveraged to win the presidency in 1999. If socialism can work anywhere, it should work in Venezuela, which has more proven petroleum reserves than any nation on earth. And for a short time, the money flowing through the PDVSA to the Chavez administration did buy additional education and healthcare for the poor. But the flow soon proved insufficient to the socialist appetite for free money to spend.
In the 2000s, Chavez expanded the government’s takeover of the economy, especially the oil sector. In the absence of market-imposed financial discipline, mismanagement propagated. And with no profit motive to reward innovation or investment, maintenance of productive capacity declined, followed by production. Between 1998 and 2021 output fell from almost 3.5 million barrels per day to 654,000.
It was during this time that Machado, a mother of three and an industrial engineer with a master’s degree in finance, led an effort to recall Chavez. It failed, and the following year, the government brought conspiracy charges against her. Amid an international outcry, her trial was suspended, and in 2010, she won a seat in Venezuela’s National Assembly, becoming a consistent critic of the administration.
In the years that followed, she endured physical attacks from regime supporters on both the streets and the floor of the assembly. But Chavez himself wouldn’t deign to mention her name.
When confronted by her directly as he spoke to the assembly in 2012, he retorted that “an eagle does not hunt flies.” The eagle died the next year, though a disturbing graphic of his eyes still gazes out on some Venezuelan buildings and landmarks. His successor and former vice president, Maduro, once claimed to be in communication with Chavez from beyond the grave, and maintains a hostile stance toward the country’s surviving vestiges of a private sector.
Inflation has skyrocketed, with the 2023 rate of 337 percent actually marking an improvement over prior years. Amid price controls, basic goods are often unavailable. The average private sector salary of $160 per month is less than half the amount needed, $372, just to buy food for a family of four. Health care is a horror show. But in a way, the redistribution scheme now known as Chavismo has worked as intended. Misery has been spread equitably across the population. Among those not connected to the regime, everyone lives hand to mouth.
A Beacon of Hope
After being expelled from her assembly seat on dubious charges, Machado took her opposition to the airwaves by hosting a popular radio show. She won a primary to face Maduro in the 2024 election, but then Venezuela’s comptroller disqualified her from holding office for a period of fifteen years. And after Maduro won a reelection widely derided as a sham, she went into hiding for her safety. Machado has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded in October. But the prize she really wants, and seems to think is close, is the freeing of her homeland from tyranny. Though not a Milei-style libertarian, she has seen firsthand the destruction full-on socialism brings, and like most of the Venezuelan people, wants to opt out.
What will happen if political and economic freedom come to Venezuela?
Properly implemented, free markets function like the paraphrase of a Beatles song: the wealth you take is equal to the wealth you make. With its oil reserves, Venezuela has a tremendous amount of wealth still to make. With a system that creates opportunities and incentives for individuals to better themselves by working to create things of value for others, an economic sleeping giant could awaken.
In their hearts, Venezuelans have already taken the first step toward this. Machado’s popularity proves it. Further steps will require as much courage and perseverance as her long fight against Chavismo.
Socialist experiments leave a lot of wreckage behind. But they also leave an object lesson in what not to do. Americans should take note.