tl;dr is that the Chavista government has a history of either buying or censoring political entities that are against them, the ones that pose a true danger to them are either murdered (Óscar Pérez), jailed until compliance (Leopoldo López), jailed and tortured until being forgotten (Simonovis), or jailed until disillusion (Juan Requesens), and the ones that they can buy they can either wait until they are big enough to cause a true movilization in the people (Henrique Capriles, Maria Corina Machado, Manuel Rosales), or simply be a failed plant that nobody believed anyway (Arias Cárdenas, Henri Falcón)

You will see everyone talking about María Corina Machado and Edmundo González being noble crusaders for the freedom of Venezuela, my unpopular opinion is that it's bullshit, just one look at MCM's biography and accomplishments and you can see that it is empty, she only was a national assembly deputy for a couple years and did nothing except once when she confronted Chávez so many years ago that it's inconsequential, she did NOTHING else politically speaking except for funding a couple things like the Súmate civil association which like did a couple public voting things and stuff that were also inconsequential

This history starts becoming interesting after the black friday devaluation of the bolivar [1] in relation to the dollar in Venezuela, but I won't go so far back, however I'm throwing it out there if you'd like to research into it to further understand Venezuelan economics.

After Chávez died in 2013, the economy was pretty much headed to disaster due to the rebounding effect of the bonanza that existed during his government, there were many social plans that did put the people forward and everything was manageable due to historically high oil prices - here we must remember Venezuela is an oil country, to its dutch disease detriment or to its benefit - and the failing economy was spearheaded both by spending in these social plans along with expropiations of many industries, farms, cement producers, everything you can think of was being expropiated in a divisive rhetoric, and the stuff that the government already owned was being scrutinized to the point where basically everyone in Venezuela knows somebody whose family was publicly fired by Chávez in the pitazos [1] due to them not being adjacent to the government, this of course led to an even less meritocratic hiring process of accepting personnel whose capabilities were not questioned, it was just based on ideology and this led to inefficacy in most expropiations that took place [1], so you would see then a high number [1] [2] of abandoned and dilapidated previously working factories.

Then, after Chávez died he pointed Maduro as his successor and thus, won the election as the ideological heir of Chavismo. Now we must give context on these two people, Chávez was incredibly charismatic, people-forward, quick-thinking, and socialist to a fault. I do believe he had good intentions to the country and that the resentment that the middle and higher classes feel towards him was because he did fully support the people who were lowest in the societal ranks and that scared the populous that wasn't part of it, as they wouldn't want them to be equals for there must be somebody oppressed in every capitalist system, and Chávez gave a voice and a vote to the poorest; but Maduro wasn't all this, he wasn't even a fifth of it and the people knew.

Maduro was an incredibly uncharismatic, unfunny, and kind of ridiculed from day 1, so the in-government Chavista regime was prepared for a falloff without their leader, and they started to experiment with radical methods, calling Chávez the wall that repelled all of those 'crazy ideas that we have' [1] [2] so, as they thought the government would fall any day now without their true leader, they began the systematic and cruel destruction of the food industry and logistics of transport so that the people was too hungry to protest it [1] [2] [3]

This was a time when people were living solely off mangoes sprinkled with salt [1] (remember this is tropical mangos grow on trees here everywhere lol) and sardines. There was no production of anything, everything had to be imported, and even then the SUNDDE (National Superintendency for the Defense of Socioeconomic Rights) [1] was actively enforcing commerces to reduce prices to a loss [1], with jail as the criminal punishment for incompliance, what this meant was that sellers wouldn't want to sell legally and you'd have black markets even for toilet paper. [1] And the sellers that would go forward with it would, which was my case, first call all their friends with a cheerful "there's X product, come quick through the warehouse" as was my case due to my family being friends with the manager of one of the big supermarkets in a city an hour and a half away. I'm not ashamed of this as some people did have these benefits, I have however not been except of hunger every single time. I remember almost crying over being able to eat frosted flakes (Kellogg's was also expropiated [1])

This caused incredibly long lines of people standing around for well over 10 hours in almost every case just for the CHANCE to BUY something, I remember my mom getting calls to come over because the convenience store 4 blocks down had flour.

Some other sources for this kind of stuff before I jump onto more recent times: [1] [2]

So, this deliberate hunger was, to my brother and I's eyes at least, a subordination of the people in order to be fully able to do what they could to scrape the pan of every single dollar they could, for if the people's main concern was food, they wouldn't see anything else going on.

Here comes the most salacious part of this, the narc-state and the billions of dollars of drug money. [1] It is not a secret or a conspiracy that Venezuela is funded by drug money [1], usually specifically cocaine, and the business [1] is helmed by a couple families just as the mafia it is, the most infamous one being the Cartel de los Soles [1], the cartel of the suns, this is because this is a military-ran drug cartel and the military's highest rank order sign is the golden sun of Carabobo [1] (for the keen-eyed you would probably remember this as the logo for my fashion brand lol this is how deep I'm getting into this shit) and these people did not run their strategies right and some got caught [1] even people with direct ties to the president [1], some of these cases led to a lot of Chavista narc-funded international assets to be seized and accounts frozen. [1] [2] (specially chapter 1)

What happens now? Juan Guaidó comes in.[1] This political fresh face had been serving as the National Assembly president for just 3 weeks when he self-proclaimed himself as interim president [1] on the basis of article 233 of the Venezuelan constitution that affirms that the president of the legislative power can take control of the country in the situation of a power void, which is what Guaidó considered was taking place due to the last elections being deemed illegitimate. [1] Now this is all good, people were hyped and although nobody really saw him as an incredible leader because we did not know him I do remember people were excited on this legally-based prospect for a new president and finally being free from dictatorship. What happens next will shock you: after many countries, including the US and many official and respected world organizations recognize him as president, he enacts a request to recover the frozen assets [1] in order to use the money narratively stolen from the Venezuelan people, to help the Venezuelan people in the power struggle between the two. He manages to get them back [1] [2] [3] and "misuses it" [1] and then fucking dips and nobody knows from him again politically speaking, he is now living wealthily in Miami playing tennis. [1] and is hated as the traitor he is. [1] [2]

Guaidó's is an exemplar take on dirty politics, imagine installing your own opposition in order to dupe the world into thinking they're the leader that will pull us out, and internationally show face to recover frozen assets, and then fucking dipping and live off as a rich man. From a nobody working minimum wage in a computer store [1] to main pawn of a narc-state's mission to recover their frozen goods. Now given the history of Guaidó, a member of the Voluntad Popular party, in a similar vein to Corina Machado's MUD, we can attest to the nature of the opposition, I could go into Capriles Radonski's or Henri Falcón's, or Ramos Allup's many such antics, but what I want to convey here is mostly that they are not to be trusted for they are an extension of the government.

And this is the part that ties everything up again, Corina Machado's plans of exacerbated neoliberalism [1] , of rampant capitalism, and of Thatcher-inspired practices, in my opinion, will destabilize the frail state the economy is in, as it is growing naturally and organically[1], the GDP has increased for the first time in god knows how long [1], and the inflation is incredibly low considering the famous hyperinflation status we had [1]. I am not willing to bet on it exchanging the angel to know from the devil I know already, the government, after all of these insane antics, has basically held their economic suffocations to mostly a halt [1] because they are surrounded and unable to flee the country due to many arrest warrants [1] and almost decade-long international calls for justice, so they also see investing inside of Venezuela as an avenue to increase wealth and launder their money, which in turn causes a positive economic return on the basis of an organic surplus being injected instead of printing it at insane rates like we used to do [1].

So, now with all this context, the opposition has no legitimate money, as they are all career politicians in a deeply authoritative state so they have no freedoms to create wealth for themselves (we do however know that they are on the government's payroll and wealthy themselves, but I'm talking rhetorically on an innocent opposition) so, the money situation that the Chavista regime circumnavigates by drugs and money laundering will be void, the Chavista regime has an astounding amount of social welfare programs [1] [2] that even I, my family, even the most anti-government people do benefit from because it is simply distributed to all of the populous, and this costs an exorbitant amount of money, there's plans for old people with the Bono de Adulto Mayor, the Bono de Guerra, the scholarship bono, the pregnancy bono, the imprisoned bono, my parents each get $40 a month because we had to get into the legal way of getting gas in Venezuela you had to have the Sistema Patria which is where the allocation for gas is distributed [1] [2], they have your data [1] , your fingerprint[1], and your digital wallet [1] for these benefits, now, my parents did not apply for benefits because we are against the government, of course, but even if it's a $40 pay per person, with a corpus of 18 million people by 2021[1], these numbers are hard to gauge as there are dozens of bonuses comprised of smaller quantities, but let's average even less, $30 a month to account for those like me who get less benefits because I did not apply and frankly do not need them as a priority unlike a lot of people, that's still over 500 million dollars a month in social aid, with the number of people right now being over 18 million.

What happens when you take these benefits away? What happens to a populous where a desirable wage is $200 per month [1], actual public minimum wage is around $130 [1] (and way better than the minimum wage you'll get in search results of 130 Bs.S or $3.50 a month, let's be real), this is what scares me about Corina Machado's full privatization policies [1], no free social welfare, only somewhat assisted for the poorest, fully neoliberal and against socialism, the infrastructure for even basic needs like electricity[1], water [1] , and gas [1] (like the one you cook with) is poor at best and completely destroyed at worst, even the internet distribution was passed onto the chinese many years ago [1] to quell our ever increasing debt with them and it's taken them years to get to a working state[1], it still hasn't reached my home, along with systemic censorship due to limiting internet access, [1] [2]. I had to jump loops through a paid VPN sevice to get to all of these sources I'm citing, and I have a private fiber internet due to the government opening up the private avenues for internet distribution like Fibex and Satelca, but beforehand the national average before this happened was 1.6 Mbps [1] and this was on a good day, I remember rolling with 256kb/s up until a couple years ago.

I will try to cite more readable stuff since it's hard to find much more from her directly other than that single video I've cited (this one) because her whole narrative is based on the hatred of Chavismo and the dismantling of its government, the people do not want to hear plans, so she doesn't mind not specifying them. Along these lines, when speaking on it, Corina Machado exposes a need to privatize and install systems that will take from the populous what they don't have, with a social healthcare system for a non-functioning infrastructure claiming to be able to give high pay to the medical staff[1 watch out for this website though, this is a disinformation rabbit hole if you're not VERY careful], which is inconceivable down to a numbers term, as well as a focus on the privatization of schools [1] in a country with historically free schooling and university system [1] [2], and basically holding all of her candles to international investment [1] in a country that is in shambles and with poor standing regarding their debt [1] and infrastructure, it's not realistic to just beg for outside money in the current state of the world with all the ongoing wars along with the US in a detrimental economic state. I think the economy needs to solidify a little bit, under a government with a more transitory and less radical take on economics to strenghten the basis on which a new government plan is built. This is why I don't agree with the leaders and why I recoil at the thought of Corina Machado taking the power.

This is why I say that a Corina Machado government (which would be the purpose of all these protests) could harm the economy in the long term, due to the inefficacy to go through with what the people are used to and therefore damaging a very frail system that is growing in spite of all its difficulties.