Many of us were running errands, working out, or having breakfast when, in true 2026 Venezuelan fashion, one event we expected happened: María Corina Machado came back to her country.
She reappeared in the middle of a Sunday mass at the Santa Rosa basilica, a church near the city of Barquisimeto, home to the most popular Virgin Mary cult: la Divina Pastora.
Surrounded by churchgoers and members of her party, Vente Venezuela, Machado joined the mass and embraced people, in a public demonstration of prayer, faith, and hope, in line with her religious persona that made her massively popular in 2023 and 2024, when she crossed the country meeting the communities more affected by mass migration and economic collapse.
Now, many questions arise.
How did Machado come back? For the region where she is now, in western Venezuela, we can speculate she took a private plane or a boat from the Dutch islands near the Falcon coast, on a route similar to the one she made during her clandestine trip to Oslo to collect her Nobel Peace Prize in December 2025.
What will the chavista regime, and their Washington sponsors, do? As we described many times in our Political Risk Report, the chavista regime was preparing for this for months, speaking as if it wasn’t their fault that Machado wasn’t there, as if they would not have persecuted her and charged her with several crimes. Donald Trump just said that she is nice because she gifted him the Nobel Prize, so he hopes she is right.
What can happen now? Machado will organize pressure to accelerate the complicated roadmap towards rebuilding the institutions and hold elections, including a presidential one where she is finally allowed to compete. At the same time, we expect Machado to channel the public ire about blackouts and inflation, and lead a more coherent and productive campaign towards a true democratic -not only economic- transition. With the appointment of the committee that will choose new justices for the Supreme Court, while the repressive apparatus led by Diosdado Cabello continues to show muscle by harassing activists, we must expect more street action and political negotiation. This is a challenge to both Machado and Delcy Rodríguez, and a shock to the dead calm chavismo was trying to settle.
More to come. But Venezuela will get frenzied, and be interesting to global media, again.