Months before the U.S. military arrested Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, opposition leader María Corina Machado called for what she described as the most ambitious economic transformation in the nation’s history — radical privatization aimed at reversing his policies and what she calls “the disaster this socialist system has caused.”
Appearing virtually on stage at the Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh, Machado, while hiding from the Maduro regime, unveiled a bold vision to rebuild Venezuela’s shattered economy through large-scale private investment.
“Venezuela will be the biggest economic opportunity for the next decades in this region,” she said wealthDiane Brady at the 2025 edition of the forum, weeks after winning the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her decades-long fight to restore democracy in Venezuela. “We’re talking about an opportunity, business opportunity, of over $1.7 trillion. This is unique.” Machado also backed the $1.7 trillion figure, an estimate produced by her economic consulting team.
Machado painted a stark picture of a nation that fell from prosperity to poverty: “a country that was the richest country in our region and the freest country in our region and turned into one of the poorest.” It has been under socialist rule for decades, she said, crippling industry, devastating infrastructure and triggering an exodus of nearly a third of Venezuela’s population. “Our economy has collapsed, it’s down more than 80% in the last period [several] years,” she said. “Our people were forced to flee just to survive.”
The International Monetary Fund has estimated that Venezuela’s economy has shrunk by about 75% at the end of 2022, covering the migrant crisis. The left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research claimed shortly afterwards that, while this figure was accurate, it ignored severe US economic sanctions imposed on Venezuela for many years.
The opposition leader described to Brady what she called a “narco-terrorist state” built on repression and corruption, saying that “Venezuela has certainly turned into a safe haven for criminal activity around the world.” She accused Maduro and his allies of financing their grip on power through gold smuggling, arms and drug trafficking and human exploitation.
At the heart of Machado’s plan is a swift and transparent privatization process. She estimates that more than 500 businesses have been “taken by the regime, confiscated, destroyed, but the infrastructure is there.” She promised strict oversight and the rule of law from “day one” with the aim of luring investors back with stability and tax incentives. She promised open markets and an approach that would be “absolutely strict” on the rule of law and transparency, reminding Brady that Venezuela currently ranks last in terms of the rule of law. To take one example, the World Justice Project recently ranked Venezuela 142nd out of 142 countries.