Nobel laureate María Corina Machado will not lead negotiations over new elections, contrary to expectations The interim government of Venezuela has announced it will begin formal talks with the opposition aimed at “strengthening democracy” in the country.
The move is backed by the US, which says it is seeking a “democratic transition” in a country still recovering from the twin earthquakes that killed more than 4,700 people.
However, contrary to what many parties and voters had expected, the opposition will not be represented in the talks by the Nobel laureate María Corina Machado, the country’s most popular opposition figure.
Instead, its main representative will be Dinorah Figuera, who had been living in exile in Spain since 2018 but recently returned to Caracas. The formal talks were first announced by Figuera on Tuesday and later confirmed by the president of the national assembly, Jorge Rodríguez.
Rodríguez, whose sister, Delcy, is the country’s acting president, said a joint working group aimed at strengthening democracy would begin on 1 August with former members of the national assembly elected in 2015, which was then led by Figuera.
That was the first and only opposition-controlled congress elected under Chavismo, the leftwing movement named after its founder, the former president Hugo Chávez. Many of those opposition members were eventually imprisoned or forced into exile.
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