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For 25 years, Venezuela has endured a dictatorship with devastating consequences. On July 28th, in the country’s most unfair and least transparent election, María Corina Machado led a democratic movement that defeated Nicolás Maduro at the polls. Refusing to concede, the regime responded with brutal repression, illegally detaining over 2,000 Venezuelans—including women and children—and killing at least 30 people. Despite this cruelty, the democratic movement persists, forging a global coalition to unite efforts toward a democratic transition.
Speakers:
María Corina Machado is a Venezuelan politician, a presidential candidate, and leader of the democratic opposition after her landslide victory in the primary elections on October 2023, with more than 92 per cent of the votes. After being unlawfully barred from the presidential race, María Corina Machado endorsed Edmundo González Urrutia, who won the July 28, 2024 election with 70% of the vote. She spearheaded the collection of over 80% of tally sheets from electoral centers across the country, offering irrefutable evidence to the world that Edmundo González Urrutia is Venezuela’s legitimate elected president.
From the beginning of her political career, Machado’s leadership and widespread support gained her a seat in the National Assembly after receiving the most votes among all candidates during the 2010 parliamentary elections. In 2012, Machado founded VENTE, a center-right party, and continues to lead it as its national coordinator.
Today, Maria Corina Machado is known for her unique voice in Venezuela’s traditionally male-dominated political landscape. Machado is one of the 100 most influential and inspiring leaders in the world, according to the BBC (2018). María Corina Machado was also recently awarded with the 2024 Sakharov Prize for the Freedom of Thought and the 2024 Václav Havel Human Rights Prize, honoring outstanding civil society action in defense of human rights. She is also an engineer and the mother of three children.
Anne Applebaum is a journalist, a prize-winning historian, a staff writer for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where she co-leads a project on 21st century disinformation and co-teaches a course on democracy. Her books include Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism; Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956; and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Her most recent book is the New York Times bestseller, Autocracy Inc, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them. She was a Washington Post columnist for fifteen years and a member of the editorial board; she has also been the deputy editor of the Spectator and a columnist for several British newspapers. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, among many other publications.
David Smolansky served as the Mayor of El Hatillo City in Caracas, Venezuela. His tenure as Mayor gained national and international recognition for its transparency and notable reduction in kidnappings, despite operating in one of the world’s most violent capitals. His commitment to addressing human rights violations and the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Venezuela led him to play a pivotal role in non-violent protests against Maduro’s dictatorship. As a result of defending democratic values while serving in local government, he faced arbitrary arrest warrants, removal from his Mayoral role, illegal disqualification for public service, banned from voting, and ultimately, forced into exile.
After fleeing Venezuela, the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS) appointed Smolansky as the special envoy to address the Venezuelan migration and refugee crisis, the largest in the world. He authored 15 reports and conducted over 20 official visits to 11 countries in the Americas, advocating for policies to protect and integrate Venezuelan migrants and refugees who have fled Maduro’s regime.