With less than two weeks remaining before the election, Machado and her team pushed ahead. They planned another rally in a pro-government stronghold, where they knew little would go according to plan.
Over the course of the day Wednesday, her team was stopped at more than a half-dozen police and military checkpoints. They found the road blocked by asphalt trucks. The local vendor contracted to set up the speakers and stage for her rally in Guanare was detained by police, his trucks and equipment seized.
There would be no stage, but there would be an ocean of people — tens of thousands of supporters filling the streets of this city about 270 miles southwest of Caracas to see Machado speak from atop a dump truck.
“When I go to an event, I don’t know if I’ll have a stage, I don’t know if I’ll have sound, I don’t know if I’ll have transportation,” Machado told The Washington Post. “We are breaking all the myths of a political campaign.”
These are the logistical headaches of running against an autocrat.
Machado has been rallying crowds for the opposition since she won a primary last year with more than 92 percent of the vote. Venezuela’s Supreme Court, controlled by Maduro, has barred her from holding public office until 2030. So instead, she’s promoting and campaigning for a stand-in: Edmundo González, a 74-year-old former diplomat.
Polls show González leading Maduro by double-digit percentage points. But it’s Machado, the longtime critic of Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, the founder of Venezuela’s socialist state, that the crowds come to see.
For the past decade, the authoritarian government has forbidden Machado from leaving the country or traveling by plane. The opposition’s low-budget campaign has little access to government-controlled media. Highways in Caracas are lined with large billboards touting Maduro; not one promotes the opposition. The campaign doesn’t hand out promotional materials or coordinate buses for rallygoers, she said. It depends on volunteers, social media and word-of-mouth outreach.
“We don’t have fliers, we don’t have posters,” Machado said. “I don’t offer people anything, but people offer us their things — their car, their house.”
Six staffers, including the campaign director and head of communications, have been leading efforts from inside the Argentine embassy in Caracas, where they’ve been holed up for more than four months to avoid arrest warrants. The result is a campaign run on Zoom, on WhatsApp, and on social media.
Two other campaign organizers are in prison. Foro Penal, a legal organization that focuses on human rights, has counted 103 detentions in the past year.
Many aren’t campaign workers or volunteers. They’re truck drivers, hotel owners, sound technicians. Since the start of the official campaign on July 4, the government has shut down, fined or otherwise penalized at least a dozen restaurants and hotels for hosting González or Machado. González says he now travels with a lunchbox to avoid putting other people at risk for supplying him food.
“It’s like the opposite of the Midas touch,” said Alfredo Romero, the president of Foro Penal. Anything Machado touches, it seems, can be shut down or seized.
Venezuela’s Ministry of Communications did not respond to a request for comment.
Authorities last week detained a businessman in Táchira who had hosted Machado and her team in his home two weeks earlier, his lawyer said. This week in Carabobo, police detained the driver of Machado’s truck.
“It’s a pattern being repeated in every state,” said Alby Colmenares, a campaign organizer in Carabobo.
On her way to Carabobo, Machado’s team again ran into a checkpoint. Machado stepped out of her vehicle, walked past the police and climbed onto the back of a motorcycle.
“We are doing this for you guys,” she told the officers. “You’ll see. In 15 days, Venezuela will change.”
The arrest of Machado’s security chief, Melciades Ávila, followed their visit to a restaurant in Aragua state. Two women there began shouting at Machado; Ávila spoke with the women, video of the incident shows, and then quickly moved the candidates to a secure location.
Ávila was accused by the government of gender-based violence. He was released late the next day.
On Wednesday, Machado prepared to give a rally in Guanare in Portuguesa state, where Chávez once enjoyed one of his highest vote margins.
Rafael José Salcedo, the 55-year-old owner of a local company that rents out sound equipment for weddings, graduations and quinceañeras, was sitting parked where Machado planned to speak when more than 20 police officers approached.
One officer told him he wasn’t allowed to set up the sound equipment.
“I haven’t unloaded anything, I haven’t put anything on the ground yet,” Salcedo responded, he told The Post. “I’m waiting for them to give me the permit.”
The officer told him they were taking him to the police station. When he asked why, Salcedo said, he was told “They’re the orders.”
Salcedo, his brother and a friend were detained for about six hours, he said, until Machado’s event was expected to end. Officers seized his two trucks and his stage and sound equipment — his livelihood for more than 30 years — and told him he would have to go to Caracas after the election to try to get them back. Without his equipment, Salcedo is now out of work.
Machado’s campaign, meanwhile, was left to improvise.
“Getting sound in half an hour for an event with more than 50,000 people is very complicated,” said Julio Balza, communications aide. “People are afraid to rent us the sound or the press truck. We work with what we have.”
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people were flooding Guanare’s main avenue to hear Machado.
“They always do this, they take away the sound system and she always finds the way,” one woman said. A drone flew overhead; locals suspected the government. Just blocks away, Diosdado Cabello, a lawmaker close to Maduro, was holding his own campaign event.
Octavio Zambrano, a 50-year old artisanal craftsman, waited in a wheelchair outside his home for a glimpse of Machado in her caravan.
“If she doesn’t stop, that’s okay — we will go to the rally anyway,” he said. “She is very clever. She knows how to dodge what Maduro throws at her.”
In the end, Machado needed no stage. At 4:30 p.m., she appeared on top of her van as the crowd waved Venezuelan flags and trumpeted vuvuzelas. She eventually stepped onto the top of a truck and spoke.
“They blocked the streets and we overcame all of the obstacles,” she said. “They cut the power and take away our sound, we do it a cappella.”
The following morning, Machado woke early to return to Caracas for the funeral of a friend. When she and her team stepped outside, they found their cars had been vandalized, the oil drained from one and the brake hoses cut on the other.
