When she was growing up, writes Machado, Venezuela regularly held elections with peaceful transfers of power and enjoyed a degree of prosperity greater than many of its Latin American neighbors, thanks to abundant oil. That changed when Hugo Ch\u00e1vez came to power in 1999. He \u201cbegan by focusing on controlling the judicial system,\u201d replacing longtime jurists with his lackeys, and enriched himself while immiserating his people. The universities were islands of resistance, she writes, but now \u201ceven private universities\u2026have been compromised by the regime.\u201d Despite winning election to Parliament, she had to fight to take her place there, and, when she ran for president, she was cheated out of victory by Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s successor, Nicol\u00e1s Maduro. She also won the Nobel Peace Prize (which she later gifted to President Trump, who is not mentioned in the book). Machado\u2019s \u201cmanifesto\u201d is a brief set of principles, most unobjectionable on their face: \u201cOur individual liberty will forever be fully realized within a Venezuelan ecosystem booming with liberty. \u2026The people of Venezuela deserve a duly elected government that maintains the will and capacity to guarantee the safety of every citizen.\u201d She remains out of power for all that, Maduro having been kidnapped by the U.S. but with his lieutenant installed in his place. Machado\u2019s book certainly gives insight into her antisocialist views and the agenda that might follow should she in fact take office one day, but the book is a bit of a hodgepodge\u2014a chronology, a little autobiographical essay, the manifesto itself, and testimonials by various opponents of the regime\u2014that seems done in a hurry.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When she was growing up, writes Machado, Venezuela regularly held elections with peaceful transfers of power and enjoyed a degree of prosperity greater than many of its Latin American neighbors, thanks to abundant oil. That changed when Hugo Ch\u00e1vez came to power in 1999. He \u201cbegan by focusing on controlling the judicial system,\u201d replacing longtime […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6163,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6162"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6162\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}