Maria Corina Machado (MCM) had trouble making it to Puerto Ayacucho, Amazonas this week. The regime has denied her the right to air travel for a decade now, even inside Venezuela. She has to go everywhere by land. But as her campaign for freedom heats up, the regime is now barring roadways. So MCM got aboard a piragua, a canoe, and made her way up the legendary Orinoco River accompanied by the pink river dolphins and the celebrated cries of the locals.

Stopping along the way in a restaurant, in a tiny town called Corozo Pando, she bought seventeen meals for her traveling team “We are so grateful for MCM,” said the local restaurateurs, “we usually only sell two meals.” Venezuela’s economic collapse is felt most acutely in the wasted interior of the country where the criminal gangs roam and the military massacre the indigenous. It is to these places that MCM is taking her message of hope.

Like clockwork, the regime’s thugs then arrived — as they always do — to intimidate. The tax services closed down the restaurant; part of a pattern of harassment of anyone who gives MCM and her team a room in a local hotel, a meal, rental of a sound system or a vehicle. She learned of this new harassment during the rally in the state capital of Puerto Ayacucho, and went back through Corozo Pando to make common cause with the restaurateurs and tell their story to the world.

The regime is playing for keeps. Members of MCM’s team are imprisoned, disappeared into the bowls of Venezuela’s gulag system. A bunch of others are holed up in the Argentine embassy, protected from the torturers by the paper-thin line of diplomatic decorum and the Vienna Convention. The regime is arresting women now — Rocio San Miguel, the civil society activist who has been disappeared for three months. Dignora Hernandez on MCM’s team. To be sure, this is not the first time the regime targets women; more than a decade ago Hugo Chavez ruined the life of the judge Maria Lourdes Afiuni for daring to issue a decision he disagreed with. Rape and sexual violence are tools of the regime; something that must be on MCM’s mind constantly as she is confronted by the solders.

But MCM marches on. It is inspiring. These are not the days of inspiration. Reactionary politics by recalcitrant aging leaders; there’s nothing inspiring about Putin or Erdogan or Xi or Biden. There are a few exceptions; Latin America is producing the most exciting politicians these days: Javier Milei and Nayib Bukele (something I need to reflect more on). Maria Corina Machado. Her tsunami of hope washing over Venezuela is contagious. Her message is one of optimism and healing; which given the spite and vitriol the regime throws at her must be hard to maintain. How to not respond in kind, when the enemy’s attacks know no limits? MCM is not a new phenomenon in Venezuela. She managed the recall referendum against Chavez twenty years ago. She was a member of parliament, and as such openly defied the tyrant and called him a “Thief!” (something even he could not believe, he had to ask to see if he’d heard right).

She has been relentless. Watching one opposition leader rise and fall, supporting each of them in turn, working tirelessly, most often in the shadows. She once told me, “This is my life’s work. I’ve sent my family outside the country, I myself could easily exile in Spain. I don’t need this. But it’s my destiny to free Venezuela.” It has been often solitary and not infrequently embarrassing. I once wrote about the aloneness of MCM.

Well, she certainly is not alone now.

But none of this is the really courageous part. A politician, defying the odds to gain power. Nothing new here. EXCEPT SHE ISN’T. Despite all her best instincts, despite all her pride, in order to hold the opposition together and give the beleaguered Venezuelans a chance at freedom — to not miss a moment — she has stepped aside from the quest for power in favor of Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia (the only honest man the regime would let on the ballot, and then only through a mistake – one they regret).

She is involved in this monumental, epic struggle with a regime that very well might arrest and torture her and that could close down the campaign and the election at any minute. She is putting her money and her energy and her reputation and her charisma, her moment — the moment she snatched from the regime in their first mistake when they allowed the opposition to go to a primary assuming it would fail — all of this, on the line, with no guarantee of anything, including even a position in government should the opposition (with Edmundo) somehow pull off a win. WHO DOES THIS? We are all used to politicians taking tremendous risks for the promise of power. But with the real chance that Edmundo, even if he wins, might send her as Ambassador to Burkina Faso to get her out of the way — she still soldiers on, almost never blinking.

That, my friends, is inspiring. All the risk, no prize at the end — even the one you know is yours, the one that you earned through decades of often tedious and meticulous work.

And that, my friends, takes remarkable courage.