The Venezuelan opposition leader spoke to energy executives and supporters in Houston.
HOUSTON — Venezuelan opposition leader MarÃa Corina Machado made a bold pitch to energy industry executives, outlining a plan to fully privatize Venezuela’s oil and gas sector and attract more than $150 billion in foreign investment over the next decade. She spoke in Houston at the CERAWeek conference.
RELATED: Who is MarÃa Corina Machado, a key figure in Venezuela’s opposition?
Who is MarÃa Corina Machado?
MarÃa Corina Machado is a Venezuelan opposition leader and democracy activist who has been a central figure in efforts to challenge Venezuela’s socialist-led government for more than two decades.Â
Machado is an industrial engineer and the daughter of a steel magnate. She ran in an opposition primary in 2012, and later launched another presidential push in 2023, ultimately winning the opposition’s primary in a landslide. But a ban from holding public office prevented her from running against Maduro in the 2024 election, and her allies instead backed Edmundo González, a former diplomat.
González crushed Maduro by more than a two-to-one margin, according to voting machine records collected by the opposition and validated by international observers. Still, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council, loyal to the ruling party, declared Maduro the winner of the July 28, 2024, contest.Â
Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were seized from their Caracas home on January 3 in a stunning middle-of-the-night military operation ordered by President Donald Trump.
Presenting her plan in Houston
Thousands of energy insiders from nearly 90 countries are in Houston for CERAWeek.
Speaking at an event moderated by Carlos Pascual, Machado said Venezuela could push oil production from roughly 1 million barrels per day to over 5 million with the right investment conditions in place. She framed the country’s vast untapped reserves, which include the world’s largest proven oil deposits, as an opportunity waiting on institutional reform, not geology.
“The oil and gas sector in Venezuela will go fully private,” she said. “The role of the state will be strictly as a regulator.”
Her framework includes 25-year renewable contracts, royalties capped at 20%, and fiscal terms locked at signing with no retroactive changes. She promised full private property protections backed by international arbitration and called the overall package “the most competitive government take in the Western Hemisphere.”
She addressed Venezuela’s last-place ranking among 143 countries in the World Justice Project’s rule of law index, arguing it represented a chance to build stronger institutions from scratch rather than reform broken ones.
“We’re starting from scratch in the age of AI technology,” she said. “We’re building new structures.”
On elections, Machado said a free and fair vote requires at least nine months of preparation but expressed confidence the results would be overwhelming. She recounted how her movement documented its July 2024 election victory by organizing more than a million volunteers to collect tally sheets from over 30,000 polling stations, including smuggling Starlink antennas in watermelon trucks to reach areas without internet access.
She closed with a direct appeal to the executives in the room.
“The best investment you can make is in a country where the people warmly receive you,” she said. “That is Venezuela.”
Speaking to the people
Later at an event for Venezuelan-Americans, Machado spoke in Spanish to a crowd on the steps of Houston City Hall.Â
She spoke of a free and secure country where people could prosper.Â
“No hay nada más poderoso que un pueblo que decidió ser libre,” Machado said. “Es una lucha espiritual — una lucha para lograr transformar un paÃs que han convertido en un espacio del crimen, del mal, del dolor, de la persecución y la separación.”
In English, the quote reads, “Nothing is more powerful than a people who have decided to be free. This is a deeply spiritual fight — a fight to transform a country that was turned into a space of crime, pain, persecution, and separation.”
She was enthusiastically received by the crowd.
Got a news tip or story idea? Email us at newstips@khou.com or call 713-521-4310 and include the best way to reach you.