Francisco Rodríguez

And we're not sure who are going to be the relevant political actors at that moment and whether Machado's star will have faded by that moment.

That's correct.

And that, I think, is an implication of the way that she has framed the confrontation with Maduro and with Chavismo, particularly over the last few years.

There's a moment in which Machado started uttering the phrase, we can't do this alone.

So when people were saying, no, this is a problem that Venezuelans have to solve themselves, her response was, no, I mean, don't tell us that we need to solve it.

We've done everything possible.

We need the international community to intervene.

We need to ask for a military intervention, something that just about everybody in the Venezuelan opposition thought was utterly implausible, convincing even in the first Trump administration, even though he had kind of floated this idea of all options being in the table and he had mentioned the possibility of an intervention, nobody really expected that.

even if Trump won a second term, that he would actually carry it out.

But she's put all her political legs in this basket of calling for external military intervention.

And what that means is that she has not put forward ideas about how to bring forward political change in Venezuela yet.

just through domestic mobilization.

And it makes her very dependent to the political dynamics of what happens in the U.S.

And then on top of that, she's made such efforts to court President Trump.

I mean, she's even gone as far as supporting this false narrative that Nicolás Maduro and Chavismo somehow had something to do with rigging the 2020 elections against President Trump.

So yes, I mean, she regrettably has gotten burned

all of her bridges to other political actors.

Once this strategy fails, I mean, if Trump does not support her, she doesn't really have many others to appeal to.

Exactly, yeah.

Sure.