Far-right Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado presented a 100-day plan to guarantee profits for US companies in Venezuela. Photo: AS/COA.
By Misión Verdad – Jun 18, 2025
María Corina Machado, the leading figure in the far-right sector of the Venezuelan opposition, has revealed details about her private intervention before the Americas Society/Council of the Americas (AS/COA): a strategy she has dubbed “The Trillion-Dollar Opportunity.”
AS/COA is a New York-based non-governmental organization founded in 1965 by billionaire David Rockefeller and consisting of two bodies. The first, the Americas Society, is a forum for discussion on policy within the inter-American system. Its second component, the Council of the Americas, brings together international business groups promoting neoliberal policies in the Western Hemisphere.
AS/COA has established itself as a think tank for discussion on political and economic issues. It has issued reports on Venezuela and organized a dedicated working group to discuss Venezuela’s issues.
Although Machado’s meeting was private, some elements were released and are sufficient to understand the nature of the remote meeting. This working session occurred hours after Ana Corina Sosa Machado, the opposition leader’s daughter, received a medal in her mother’s name from the same organization.
Venezuela at the AS/COA
This institution’s record of events surrounding Venezuela was particularly outstanding during Juan Guaidó’s so-called “interim” administration.
Leopoldo López, Freddy Superlano, David Smolansky, Carlos Vecchio and Guaidó himself, members of the Popular Will (VP) party, have participated in these activities, which refer to AS/COA’s level of articulation with assets of Venezuela’s far-right opposition leadership.
Currently, María Corina Machado and former presidential candidate Edmundo González Urrutia make up the Venezuela Working Group.
Along with them are other Venezuelans such as:
• David Smolansky (former OAS commissioner and member of the “interim government” for migration affairs).
• Sary Levy (former director of the NGO Cedice Libertad).
• Miguel Lara Guarenas (Juan Guaidó’s commissioner for the failed VESRP initiative to privatize the national electricity system).
• Juan Carlos Navarro (businessman associated with Juan Guaidó).
• Juan Carlos Guinand (businessman).
• Isadora Zubillaga (co-founder of Popular Will, former ambassador of Juan Guaidó to France).
• Carlos Blanco (advisor to María Corina Machado).
• Ana Corina Sosa Machado (daughter of María Corina Machado).
• Rafael de la Cruz (advisor to Edmundo González).
The panel of “experts” is clearly a network of “technocrats” and political actors from Machado’s Vente Venezuela party and remnants of the failed “interim” government.
The sale of Venezuela for “a trillion dollars”
The group involved in this AS/COA initiative appears to be following a new path to money.
This is explained by their profile and by Machado’s proposal.
She made explicit that, under an unlikely opposition-led government, Venezuela would open itself up to “foreign investment” with potential to generate “a trillion dollars” of wealth in 15 years.
To achieve this goal, Machado referred to privatizing national hydrocarbon companies and transnationalizing the country’s oil and gas reserves.
She referred to Venezuela’s oil reserves as “the largest in the world,” indicating that foreign control would present an “opportunity” for the generation of wealth that would benefit US and western companies.
This opportunity, according to Machado, “covers the entire hemisphere and investors who will benefit from unprecedented conditions from day one.”
She also alluded to other resources: “We also have abundant resources of iron, gold, and minerals.”
This reference is significant, considering that Machado is heir to the Sivensa metallurgical empire built by her father, Henrique Machado Zuloaga—though she did not mention this.
In this regard, Machado spoke about the nearshoring strategy, that is, building a value chain in Venezuela close to key markets, in explicit reference to the United States for reasons of geographic positioning.
From her perspective as the heir to Sivensa, she infers that her company, together with foreign transnational corporations, could develop processes to exploit national mineral resources with the aim of projecting them onto US soil, which would imply the use of the mineral base, which is part of the national heritage, to satisfy her family’s interests.
In another vein, she referred to the nation’s freshwater reserves, 30 million hectares of “undeveloped fertile land,” and 2,800 kilometers of Caribbean coastline, ripe for foreign capital.
Machado’s offer of millions of hectares of the country for the benefit of foreign companies suggests another avenue of privatization, since such a vast territory encompasses agricultural land in the hands of the state but also vast amounts of land under conventional private ownership and some 14 million hectares handed over to families and peasant organizations over more than 20 years, under the country’s existing land allocation models.
The figure of 30 million “undeveloped” hectares is extremely striking because it declares the country’s fertile territory as idle land, precisely when Venezuela has achieved 97% of its food supply thanks to domestic production.
In this way, Machado distorts reality by making a deceptive offer to US capital and puts the country’s agricultural lands, which already have owners and tenants, up for sale.
Deliver Venezuela in just 100 days
Machado spoke of a democratic transition process “in just 100 days” to make “structural changes” and thus execute that strategy.
However, privatizing Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), implementing a hydrocarbon concession system with majority foreign capital, and granting national reserves to foreign companies under fraudulent conditions, as proposed by Machado, would be impossible under the current Constitution.
Likewise, pursuing mining investment on terms that are disadvantageous to the country, as Machado proposes, implies dismantling the laws that define the current national concession system.
Carrying out this massive land dispossession would require repealing the current Land and Agricultural Development Law; it would also entail forceful measures to exercise territorial control and implement a policy of evictions unprecedented in history.
Executing these vast, politically regressive strategies in just 100 days would only be possible through the rise of a truly repressive government in the country. This would entail the repeal of the current Constitution, the suppression of natural checks on parliamentary power, and the degradation of the existing legal framework, in addition to the widespread use of force against the population, without distinction between owners and workers.
“The billion-dollar opportunity” tacitly refers to the transfer of political power to Machado herself. But that power would have absolutist conditions and characteristics.
Personalism and lobbying
In this regard, it is necessary to highlight that, in reference to María Corina Machado’s intervention in AS/COA, according to the content that she published on her personal X account and the Comando ConVzla X account, there was no mention of Edmundo González Urrutia, nor was there any suggestion of any possible promotion of the former ambassador to the presidency to make such a proposal possible.
In the announcement, Andrés Gluski, president of the AS/COA board of directors, presented the Americas Society Gold Medal to María Corina Machado. The award was received by her daughter on US soil and took place just hours before the “billion-dollar” meeting.
There was also no mention of Edmundo González in the organization’s official statement announcing the award.
This suggests that the coordination of the members of the Venezuela Working Group within the AS/COA framework is the responsibility of Machado and her entourage—including her own daughter—together with the remnants of the bureaucracy of the defunct “interim government,” who remain active lobbyists with political actors, business leaders, and organizations in the United States.
María Corina Machado continues on the same path as Juan Guaidó, visiting the same places and appealing to the same people. In essence, the entire maneuver with the AS/COA consists of lobbying and seeking support for a violent regime change in Venezuela, offering it as a showcase for US capital.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/SL
Misión Verdad
Misión Verdad is a Venezuelan investigative journalism website with a socialist perspective in defense of the Bolivarian Revolution
