Miami. The leader of the Venezuelan opposition María Corina Machado expressed this Wednesday that she perceives “decisive hours” to Venezuelaalthough he also guaranteed a “peaceful transition” while tension grows over the arrival of the largest US aircraft carrier to the Caribbean.
“(I ask you) to accompany us in this historical moment, in its decisive hours, because what is happening in Venezuela is not only a national event, it is a turning point for all of Latin America,” Machado said virtually at a forum of former Ibero-American presidents of the IDEA Group at Miami-Dade College (MDC).
The winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize did not specifically refer to the US military deployment in the Caribbean, where this Tuesday the largest US aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, and its attack group of more than 4,000 sailors and dozens of tactical aircraft arrived.
But the opposition leader, who last week called the US president’s strategy “absolutely correct,” Donald Trumpagainst the Venezuelan ruler, Nicolás Maduro, he trusted that “today Venezuela is on the threshold of freedom” and “an unprecedented transformation.”
“We know that this time we are going to achieve it because, when a people decides to be free, there is no force on Earth capable of stopping it,” he said.
His statements come after Maduro accused this Monday the “battered right” of “nurturing the threats of the imperialist beast from the north,” while the United States attacks on nearly 20 alleged boats apparently loaded with drugs in the Caribbean and the Pacific have accumulated some 75 deaths since September 1.
Machado asserted that “people united, like no Venezuelan generation before,” is “the guarantee of an orderly, peaceful, irreversible transition,” which will turn Venezuela “into the Latin American miracle of the 21st century.”
“From day one we are going to assume institutional and territorial control, address the humanitarian emergency, establish order and transparency in finances and initiate the reforms and profound transformations that will make this change sustained and irreversible,” he promised.
The Venezuelan asked for international support from the IDEA Group, an association of former Ibero-American leaders, mostly from the right or center-right, including the Spanish José María Aznar and the Colombian Álvaro Uribe, who this Wednesday meet at Miami Dade-College to address the “end of the dictatorships of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.”
Meanwhile, France and the Russian Parliament have condemned the US attacks off Latin American coasts, while Colombia and the United Kingdom have stopped sharing intelligence with Washington due to the bombings, which Trump maintains are against “narcoterrorist” cartels.
