‘This Is a Struggle Between Good and Bad’

After Venezuela quashed dissent, opposition leader María Corina Machado went underground. In a rare interview from hiding, she shares why she’s not giving up.

María Corina Machado has barely felt the sun on her skin in 14 months. She has seen thousands of people on screens, but except for one perilous, brief moment, hardly anyone face-to-face. She has been in hiding since the days following Venezuela’s presidential election, when authorities loyal to Nicolás Maduro, the country’s autocratic leader, declared he had won a third term. Machado refused to retreat—refused to accept the results of an election that has been called tainted, fraudulent, and deeply flawed; a contest whose outcome, in the words of former U.S. Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken, “does not reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people.”