María Corina Machado denies Maduro’s claims she has ‘fled’ Venezuela: ‘They know I am here’

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has in recent days been promoting the theory that María Corina Machado has left the country, but on Wednesday the opposition leader flatly denied it. Maduro has stated, looking to score yet another victory, that Machado had gone into exile in Spain, supposedly following in the footsteps of presidential candidate Edmundo González Urrutia. “The old man,” Maduro said in reference to the veteran diplomat, “left a month ago and now the sayona — the derogatory terms he uses to refer to Machado, taken from a Venezuelan folk tale — has also left, left, left. She fled,” he said during a television appearance. Maduro is mired in a political crisis sparked by accusations of fraud surrounding the results of the July 28 presidential election, after which the government apparatus has opted to dismantle its adversaries.

Hugo Chávez’s successor has claimed that Machado traveled to Spain, where González Urrutia sought asylum after the Attorney General’s Office, which acts on the orders of the government, issued a warrant for his arrest. Chavismo is pursuing González Urrutia for publishing 83.5% of the voting records collected by polling station witnesses during the presidential election online; documents that confirm an overwhelming opposition victory over Maduro. However, the Bolivarian leader was declared the winner by the electoral authorities, who have refused to publish the official paper ballots from the election. The maneuver was ratified weeks later by the Supreme Court, which is also co-opted by Chavismo.

A negotiation carried out at the residence of the Spanish ambassador in Caracas led to González Urrutia’s departure into exile in Madrid, from where he claimed that he was coerced into signing a document in which he accepted — although he stressed he did not agree with — the judicial decision by which Maduro has tried to validate his victory.

Machado has lived in semi-clandestine conditions for the past few months and — given the increase in the repression of her colleagues and supporters and a wave of arrests — has not called for fresh protests in the streets. After González Urrutia left Venezuela, the opposition leader, who was prevented from running in the election by the courts and ceded her candidacy to the veteran diplomat, insisted that she will continue the fight from within the country to secure recognition of the opposition’s victory and for González Urrutia to be sworn in as president on January 10, 2025, when the new mandate begins. On Wednesday, in an interview with El Venezolano TV, she denied the story that Maduro has repeated over and again. “Venezuelans know that I am here in Venezuela and Nicolás Maduro knows it too,” Machado stressed. “They are desperate to find out where I am, but obviously I am protecting myself and taking care of myself, because I am not going to give them that pleasure.”

Maduro’s supporters are focused on speculation about Machado’s whereabouts, while the international community remains cautious about recognizing the president’s victory in the elections. On Wednesday, in contradiction to Maduro’s thesis, the president of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, Chavismo’s main political operator, said that Machado is residing in an Embassy in Caracas.

González Urrutia initially took refuge in the Dutch Embassy and spent his last days in Caracas in the Spanish diplomatic headquarters. Machado also decided to take refuge as the persecution of various senior opposition leaders intensified. At least 66 political figures from parties critical of the government have been arrested and are among the more than 1,700 people, including 160 minors, who were detained in the wake of the protests against the election results.

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