Caracas Chronicles

On November 18, María Corina Machado published a concise text titled “Manifiesto de la Libertad” (actually signed on November 9). The post on X states it has two recipients: Venezuelans and “our president” Edmundo González Urrutia. The first recipient was obvious. The manifesto intends to clarify the doctrinal principles of Machado’s potential political project for a post-Maduro Venezuela. The second recipient, however, is murkier. The gesture of outlining these principles to the person who could be the next president is also an effort to reaffirm that the leading voice of that future government will not belong to the president, but to Machado. It is also a way of preemptively stripping González Urrutia of the power he might wield in the presidency, which is critical in a transition.

The manifesto has a fundamental ideological problem: it starts from the assumption that natural rights exist. This idea brewed in liberal thought during the transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity, especially in Anglo-Saxon liberalism, from which Machado draws, with some modifications. It says that there are rights inherent to the human condition, from which assumptions about good governance, a good state, good law, and a good life are derived.

Machado speaks of “eternal rights that have been granted to every human being,” that “the will to work, create, and contribute to the common good is born of dignity,” and that “freedom is not a privilege granted by the government, but a right inherent in the very nature of humanity,” concluding that “every Venezuelan is born with inalienable rights granted by our Creator, not by men.”

The trap of “natural” rights

This conception of natural rights erases the fact that, in the real world, rights are produced by human beings, not by nature or God. Although Machado asserts that “no regime, political system, or tyranny has the power to take away what is divinely ours: the right to live with dignity, speak freely, create, dream, and prosper as individuals,” the last few years under Maduro demonstrate that a tyranny can indeed nullify rights, as can happen anywhere in the world. Ultimately, every right depends on the existence of a political community capable of recognizing and upholding them: a community that, in modern times, refers to the state, which, just as it enshrines them, can also violate them. Without a state, there are no rights whatsoever.

Biology does not produce our rights, and regarding human nature, philosophers like Thomas Hobbes claim that it is inherently violent, while Jean-Jacques Rousseau says that it is inherently benevolent and that society corrupts it. Nor does appealing to the Creator contradict the political reality of every right.

When Machado speaks of “returning power to the people, to the citizens, to the private sector,” is she saying that citizens are equivalent to the private sector? Is citizenship only exercised in the private sphere?

No one has rights outside of a state. We Venezuelans know that. We learned it in the Darién region, outside the bounds of any legality, and within Venezuela, where there is no real recourse to restore these rights except the struggle to regain political power. Supranational bodies like the International Criminal Court, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights or the United Nations lack political power over the Venezuelan state, and have no capacity to guarantee our rights are not violated, no matter how natural or fundamental they may be.

We cannot know if Machado is aware of this tedious problem of political philosophy, but it is certainly useful for her to assert these rights as natural, because it is politically effective. In fact, we can expect that the economic destruction, the widespread political violence, the mass exodus, and the destruction of the Venezuelan social fabric have stimulated “right-wing” or “liberal” values. Machado speaks to this common sense and makes the Manifiesto resonate with ideas that, far from being innate, have rather gradually taken root in popular sentiment. 

There are more obvious rights to proclaim: freedom of expression, the right to vote, the right to freedom of assembly, and the right to be safe from crime and state violence. And let us clarify here: recognizing that these are not natural rights is not opposing them, but rather acknowledging that their only guarantee is the very action and community organization of a people organized as a state. When Machado speaks of “returning power to the people, to the citizens, to the private sector,” is she saying that citizens are equivalent to the private sector? Is citizenship only exercised in the private sphere?

The neoliberal tradition, from the Mont Pelerin Society to thinkers like Von Mises, Hayek, and Friedman, maintains that true freedom is the economic one, and that any interference with private property or the market is a violation of natural rights. “When the state lays its heavy hand on the market, it stifles the human spirit that gives genuine vitality to growth,” Machado states, without realizing or admitting that the manifesto contains a problematic contradiction for the future Venezuelan democracy.

A manifesto created to self-destroy

Machado speaks of a state limited to creating “the conditions for a free and competitive economy to flourish.” In the neoliberal ideal, the state is a mere administrator of the law, and must act in a predictable and calculable way for economic actors, restricting all “arbitrary” interference. This ideal, however, is anti-democratic: in a society of citizens—who are not only economic beings, but also social and political beings—where the right to vote is also a “natural” right, as Machado says, and “the streets belong to the people,” Venezuelans can never be deprived of their voice regarding their social, economic, and political rights.

The tension in her Manifiesto lies in recognizing which freedom is truly paramount: economic or political, the freedom of the market over democracy or the freedom of democracy over the market.

Today, the idea of ​​reclaiming the private sector from the public sector and the market from the state may “seem natural.” However, when we begin to discuss, for example, how to protect the Venezuelan biosphere from the environmental catastrophe generated by chavismo, we will find that all the proposals will involve restricting the free economy. The same could be said of Machado’s objective of achieving a “self-sufficient people,” a promise of autarky that is antithetical to the free market, where only economic interventions from the state have managed to produce situations of near-full employment (in Latin America as well as in the West in general).

Even the very banner of sovereignty, independence, and national development is antithetical to the unrestricted free market. Augusto Pinochet, the best student of the Chicago School, did not abolish the 10% tax on copper exports because he needed that state income to finance his Armed Forces. Ronald Reagan, in his greatest offensive against the American Welfare State, did not for a second halt investments in the military industry, with the Keynesian effects that this entailed, because backtracking on that point was a risk to national security. The post-chavista FANB will also demand restrictions on free-market policies to protect sovereignty and the military bureaucracy.

The state that Machado envisions in this Manifiesto de la Libertad is not the one that will be possible in the post-Chávez era. Nor is it a state that can be fully achieved in a democracy. The tension in her Manifiesto lies in recognizing which freedom is truly paramount: economic or political, the freedom of the market over democracy or the freedom of democracy over the market.

This requires seriously considering the role of the state in Venezuela’s future, without anti-Chávez phobias or neoliberal dogmas. It requires acknowledging that without the state there are no rights, just as a state alone is insufficient to guarantee those rights.