Venezuelan woman dares to raise her voice against Chavez

CARACAS, Venezuela -- She's the Venezuelan government's most detested adversary, a young woman with a quick wit and machine-gun- fast delivery who often appears in Washington or Madrid to denounce what she calls the erosion of democracy under President Hugo Chavez.

In a highly polarized country, Maria Corina Machado has emerged as perhaps the most divisive figure after Chavez, a woman who is either beloved or reviled.

Machado, 38, attractive and a fluent English speaker, is lionized by her allies in the opposition as a worldly sophisticate fighting for democracy. But she is demonized by the government, which characterizes her as a member of a corrupt elite that is doing the bidding of the much-reviled Bush administration.

Machado does not hide her closeness to Washington, which has provided financial aid to Sumate, the anti-Chavez election- monitoring organization she helps to run. In May, she infuriated the government when she met with President Bush at the White House, and she further antagonized officials in September by announcing that Sumate had received a fresh infusion of $107,000 from Washington.

Machado casts her role as that of a watchdog uncovering the electoral shenanigans that she says Chavez uses to consolidate his hold, a precarious job in Venezuela these days.

"You can push and push, but at some point they are going to get tired and say, 'It is time to get her off our backs,' " Machado said.

That time arrived for her in September 2004. In a case that Human Rights Watch says is riddled with violations of due process, the Attorney General's Office charged her and three other Sumate officials with treason and other crimes for having accepted American financing to mount a referendum last year asking voters whether they wished to remove Chavez from the presidency.

Accepting prosecution arguments that Sumate's work amounted to an effort to "destroy the nation's republican form," a Venezuelan judge in July ruled that the four should face trial.

The trial is set for Dec. 6, and a conviction could carry a 16- year prison term. "It was the first time I discovered what it was like to have my legs tremble," she said, recalling her interrogation before a prosecutor.

After being charged last year, Machado, a divorced mother of three, sat down with her daughter, then 14, and told her of the dangers that lay ahead. She then sent the girl and her two younger brothers off to stay with their grandparents because of fears that government fanatics could ransack the house.

"Tears rolled down my face," she recalled recently over a strong dose of Venezuelan coffee at a trendy cafe in a solidly anti-Chavez neighborhood. "My lawyer had worried that they'd show up at midnight looking for me."

She leaned across the table, slightly embarrassed, and said she did not want to present herself as a victim. "I think that would be pathetic," she said.

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