Después de casi 10 meses fuera del país, María Corina Machado, líder de la oposición antichavista y Premio Nobel de la Paz, ha regresado a Venezuela. “Estoy aquí, con ustedes”, ha escrito en sus redes sociales la dirigente opositora en la mañana del domingo. Poco después de su enigmático mensaje, el excandidato presidencial Edmundo González terminó por confirmar el regreso: “¡Venezuela! Me emociona muchísimo anunciarles que nuestra líder, mi querida María Corina, está en territorio venezolano. Hoy es un día importante para los venezolanos. ¡Nuestra voz soberana retorna con ella para liderar y encaminar este proceso!“, señaló, al tiempo que aseguró que “muy pronto” él también regresará.

La primera imagen de la opositora en su país ha sido en la Iglesia de Santa Rosa, en Barquisimeto, en el occidente de Venezuela. Los videos la muestran con varios rosarios al cuello, abrazando gente y con decenas de personas a las puertas del templo esperándola. Los videos registran un corto recorrido en una camioneta en el que decenas de personas la graban con sus celulares. “¡Vamos María tú puedes, estamos contigo!”, le gritaban. “Te esperábamos”, le gritaba otra señora. “¡Libertad!¡Libertad!“, jaleraon en coro.

La entrada de María Corina, la dirigente con más respaldo según todas las encuestas, no ha sido sencilla. En los últimos tres meses, hubo al menos siete intentos en barcos, vuelos comerciales y privados y por tierra. Desde Virginia, en Estados Unidos, Panamá y Curazao. Todos fueron bloqueados, cancelados a última hora por averías o sin explicación. Aunque nadie de su entorno ha dicho públicamente quién le ha impedido viajar, no hay muchas dudas de que su salvoconducto dependía de la aprobación de Estados Unidos, con la que no contaba. La cadena Newsmax, próxima al trumpismo, aseguró que Machado entró por Colombia.

Su retorno lleva meses desencadenando un hervidero de rumores y versiones sin confirmar sobre su ingreso, y mantenía en alerta al gobierno chavista. La dirigente venezolana vuelve con la intención manifiesta de entrar de lleno en el juego político.

Su sola presencia en el país representa un desafío para Washington, que lleva meses intentando aplazar su regreso e incluso impidiéndolo, según han ido reportando varios medios en los últimos meses. Al ser preguntado por su regreso, Donald Trump ha dicho a los periodistas: “Espero que esté a salvo, es una mujer muy agradable”. Poco después, el secretario de Estado, Marco Rubio, aseguró, sin celebrar explícitamente el la vuelta de Machado a Venezuela, que había sido posible como “resultado de las conversaciones apoyadas por Estados Unidos”.

También es un reto para los líderes del chavismo, que la consideran el enemigo público número uno. Aunque ahora el chavismo mantiene que no había vetado su vuelta y que incluso les puede suponer una ventaja política, al asumir que Machado se quemará rápidamente, pesan las advertencias de que deberá rendir cuentas a su regreso. El régimen la acusa, entre otras cosas, de haber promovido la invasión de Estados Unidos al país. El ministro del Interior, Diosdado Cabello, llegó a advertir en su programa de televisión: “No te diré cuál es la sorpresa que le tengo”.

El chavismo había dedicado mucha energía en los últimos meses a minar el liderazgo de la opositora y había logrado cierto respaldo de Washington, que dio señales de que, de momento, no quería a Machado en Venezuela. Pero volver a su país era clave para el futuro político de Machado. Aunque cuenta con la imagen positiva más alta entre los líderes políticos del país (un 57,4% de intención de voto, según la última encuesta de agosto Latam Pulse de AtlasIntel para Bloomberg), su incidencia en las decisiones políticas que se toman en el país que aspira a gobernar era nula.

Machado regresa con la intención de ponerse al frente de la oposición al chavismo ante un eventual, pero incierto, escenario electoral.

Desde que se marchó de Venezuela en diciembre para recoger su Nobel de la Paz, Machado manejaba desde Washington —y después desde Panamá— su estrategia de lobismo para lograr volver al país. Mantenía diariamente reuniones con actores influyentes de todo el arco político para lograr un objetivo que no terminaba de concretarse y que empezaba a dibujarse sin ella. El entorno de Trump —auspiciado por el chavismo— llevaba meses apartándola hasta el punto de abrir una vía hacia la transición de Venezuela sin ella. “No puedo liderar este proceso desde el extranjero”, dijo a mediados de septiembre, días antes de intentar volver desde Panamá.

Desde el 1 de agosto, el Gobierno de Delcy Rodríguez y Dinorah Figuera —presidenta de la Asamblea Nacional de 2015, cuyo regreso al país fue respaldado por Estados Unidos— negociaron una hoja de ruta centrada en la renovación total del Tribunal Supremo de Justicia y del Consejo Nacional Electoral, banderas que también reivindicaba Machado. Pero la mesa contempla, además, la celebración de elecciones de gobernadores y alcaldes antes de las presidenciales, una fórmula que Machado había rechazado de plano y de forma explícita el pasado mes de mayo en una reunión con varios miembros de la oposición.

No fue la única señal de que los estadounidenses no compartían la urgencia de Machado por volver. El episodio que marcó los últimos meses de Machado fuera de Venezuela fue el que protagonizó tras el doble terremoto de junio, que dejó más de 6.500 muertos. Entonces intentó volver en dos ocasiones desde Centroamérica, y en ambas la maniobra fue frenada por altos funcionarios estadounidenses. Preguntado entonces por el episodio, Donald Trump lo negó: “No… no, para nada… ¿Cómo le voy a decir eso? Ella es increíble. Es una persona maravillosa”.

Washington, hasta entonces, alegaba preocupaciones por la seguridad de la política a su llegada al país. Luego, el propio secretario de Estado de Estados Unidos, Marco Rubio, dijo que podía volver cuando quisiera, “como cualquier ciudadana venezolana”. Mientras Delcy Rodríguez estaba en Nueva York en la Asamblea de las Naciones Unidas, la dirigente volvió a intentarlo sin éxito una quinta, sexta y séptima vez.

Fundadora de Vente Venezuela, Machado había salido del país a comienzos de diciembre de 2025, tras más de un año y medio en la clandestinidad, en un arriesgado periplo que la llevó disfrazada por las autovías del occidente venezolano y luego, en una embarcación precaria y con lesiones incluidas, en alta mar hacia Curazao, rumbo a Oslo, donde recibiría el Nobel de la Paz.

Inhabilitada para las presidenciales de 2024 —en las que el chavismo se proclamó vencedor pese a las actas que demostraban lo contrario— Machado se había convertido en el principal soporte de la candidatura de consenso de Edmundo González Urrutia, considerado el ganador real de aquellos comicios con el 70% de los votos.

When Hulk Hogan sued the tabloid Gawker in 2016 for publishing a sexual video without his consent, no one gave him a chance of winning. But Hogan won the case and was awarded $140 million in damages, which led to the online outlet’s demise. Peter Thiel, one of Silicon Valley’s most shadowy figures, tipped the legal battle: he secretly funded Hogan’s lawyers. He wanted revenge on Gawker because it had ridiculed him for years and outed him as gay.

After that legal victory Thiel, the founder of PayPal, believed the jury’s support for Hogan signaled a deep social shift. He foresaw, before most, the victory of a New York real estate developer with a reputation as a womanizer in that year’s election. At the time, Donald Trump was still an unlikely candidate. “Wow, he might win the election,” Thiel thought, he later told The Atlantic. A few weeks after that he delivered a speech at the Republican National Convention that helped launch Trump’s political career.

A decade later, Peter Thiel, 58, is the most influential figure in Silicon Valley since Steve Jobs emerged in the late 1970s. A libertarian, anti-establishment promoter of technoconservatism, he is behind the rise of political figures such as Vice President J. D. Vance, who worked for him at Mithril Capital, one of his investment funds, and Ted Cruz, the senior Republican senator from Texas. He has inspired the United States’ technological nationalism and opposes international organizations born after World War II, such as the United Nations and NATO. In late September he took part in a lecture series in Nashville in which he warned about the “Antichrist” and the dangers of regulating artificial intelligence. This is not the first time he has cloaked attacks on those who would regulate Big Tech in religious rhetoric. He did the same last year at similar conferences in San Francisco, Rome and Paris.

“He is the father of a small but powerful sect that pursues these extremist, antidemocratic ideas in Silicon Valley,” says Gil Durán, a writer and journalist and author of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, in an email interview. “For 30 years, he has preached against democracy and government, which he called ‘fundamentally evil,’ while investing in companies that provide surveillance to the government.” He adds: “His hijacking of Christian rhetoric conceals Silicon Valley’s true religion, where many believe they are creating a god called AI that will grant eternal life, let them travel to the heavens in spacecraft and enjoy an endless, abundant paradise. Silicon Valley is reshaping Christianity in its own image.”

His intellectual baggage alarms the left. He opposes taxes, has set up a corporate apparatus with residency in multiple countries to minimize his tax burden; rejects the woke movement, including climate change; loathes universities; and encourages start-up founders to flout regulatory limits.

A few months ago, he traveled to Argentina, where he has bought a mansion. He has forged close ties with Javier Milei’s government and is scouting land in Patagonia to revive his dream of creating autonomous cities that operate under their own laws, independent of other administrations. It’s something similar to what he promoted in Próspera Zede, an urban settlement on the Honduran island of Roatán that he wants to expand to other parts of the world.

Thiel is also the founder of Palantir, one of the darkest companies in the global tech landscape. Founded three years after the 9/11 attacks, when the Bush administration prioritized security over civil liberties, Palantir processes massive databases that search for patterns and vulnerabilities. The company, named after an object in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, was born thanks to a CIA contract. Today, governments around the world use its services.

“He does not believe in democracy, nor that human beings can live together peacefully without some authority,” explains philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh, a professor at the University of Vienna who studies the relationship between ethics and technology. “Thiel believes in the role of elites; he thinks that if you don’t keep people under an authoritarian regime, episodes of violence will occur. He believes there is an elite of visionaries like himself who should lead the world. He thinks the tech companies that created AI should operate freely, without regulation or limits, to accelerate progress.”

He is an eccentric man full of contradictions. As Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and the Rise of the Silicon Valley Oligarchs, describes him, he is very intelligent but also socially awkward. Thiel was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1967, the son of an engineer whose work took the family around the world. After spending a few years in apartheid South Africa, the family emigrated to the U.S. when Thiel was still a child. They settled in Foster City in the San Francisco Bay Area. There, in the early 1980s, with Republican and evangelical Christian parents, Thiel grew up amid chess pieces and science fiction books. In school, he was considered a brilliant student by teachers and a nerd by classmates. He read fantasy and science fiction endlessly — Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke — but his favorite work was The Lord of the Rings, which he admitted he had reread a dozen times.

When he arrived at Stanford University in 1985, he was the target of jokes and taunts that bordered on bullying because of his arrogant, introverted character. There he became acquainted with the libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand and discovered René Girard and his theory of mimetic desire. “We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires,” the French thinker wrote; Thiel attended Girard’s Stanford classes and read works such as To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology. It was during this period that he developed his anti-communism and his distrust of universities and intellectual elites. His views gave free rein to the resentment he had built up over the years.

Girard’s work profoundly marked him. Thiel developed disturbing political, social and technological theories around the French philosopher and anthropologist’s thought, which holds that mimetic desire leads to envy, social rivalry and the emergence of scapegoats who serve as a release valve to avoid mass conflict. From this comes his theory about the Antichrist, Armageddon and the Katechon, a Greek term meaning that which restrains the Antichrist.

“He has an unhealthy obsession with the Antichrist, the figure around which his personal theology revolves,” says Gil Durán. “It is anti-Christian, and his sermons accuse all his political enemies of being possible vectors of the Antichrist. He encourages people to view our current politics as an existential battle between good and evil. He accuses Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, critics of AI and even the Pope of being possible Antichrists. It’s pure gibberish, but it’s also a kind of confession. If Silicon Valley billionaires want to see the face of evil, they should look in the mirror.”

He also drew on the work of conservative political theorists such as Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, the latter a former member of the Nazi party. He mixed their theses on the deficiencies of liberal democracy with Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. As Coeckelbergh explains, “Girard’s influence on Thiel manifests in the threat of violence under civilization, under democracy. From Carl Schmitt, he takes this friend-versus-enemy thinking, where there is really no place for democracy” because we must always be ready to defend ourselves from the enemy. In 2009, Thiel wrote a controversial essay: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” After being harshly criticized for the piece, he issued an apology of sorts that did not settle the matter.

Professor Roberto J. González, author of War Virtually, which analyzes how tech companies are arming the military for a new kind of war, believes Thiel’s philosophical reflections have little impact beyond convincing some investors and executives “that they are part of a noble, even sacred, mission to rescue Western civilization.” But Thiel does have “immense impact through his investment firms. Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund, financed Palantir, Anduril, Clearview AI, Flock Safety and other defense and surveillance start-ups that have received massive, multibillion-dollar government contracts,” he concludes, highlighting the contradiction between Thiel’s libertarian ideas and his dependence on public contracts.

After leaving Stanford and failing in Wall Street and Washington, Thiel returned to the San Francisco area disillusioned, and raised money from family and friends to start a fund to invest in tech start-ups. In 1998, he met a young Russian-born engineer, Max Levchin, who was experimenting with software to exchange IOUs. Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.

A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism. Around that time, the group known as the PayPal mafia — former employees and founders of the company — emerged as investors in major tech firms such as Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI and YouTube. In 2002 they sold the company to eBay for more than $1.5 billion.

Ber Tarnoff, co-author with Quinn Slobian of Muskism, a study of the Tesla founder’s thinking, does not believe Thiel borrowed libertarian ideas from Musk. Thiel “has long been interested in exit strategies from the state, unlike Musk, whose emphasis has always been on state symbiosis.”

Thiel’s example at PayPal, his boldness in investing in emerging companies and his aggressive style were crystallized in a book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, a bestseller in which he argues that entrepreneurs are nearly divine, that monarchies are more efficient than democracies, and that sects are a good organizational model. Thiel encourages breaking rules to create successful companies that achieve monopolies, his true obsession, Chafkin notes in his biography. For Thiel, the goal is not to be more productive or competitive: it is to create monopolies from entirely new concepts or ideas.

Thanks to the proceeds from selling PayPal, in 2004 he decided to invest $500,000 in a start-up founded by a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg. In exchange for his investment, he received 10% of the nascent social network, which eventually made him a visionary, and he imposed his disruptive vision for managing the company on Zuckerberg. The entrepreneur must be untouchable, retain power, and rules must be broken to succeed. In this way, Zuckerberg rose at Facebook, considered one of the most harmful companies of the new economy.

The year after investing in Facebook, he founded Founders Fund, a venture capital firm aimed at discovering disruptive companies with the potential to change the world. The fund’s portfolio includes SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Airbnb, OpenAI and Polymarket. The fund outlines the characteristics such companies must have: “The best companies create their own industries. They are not popular, they are hard to evaluate, they have technological risks, but not insurmountable technological risks, and if they succeed, their technology will be extraordinarily valuable.”

He wraps it all in a philosophical cloak. In an interview with The New York Times, he argued that humanity’s biggest problem is technological stagnation. “We should have colonies on the Moon, robots, flying cars, cities on the ocean, under the ocean,” he said in a speech. “We should have organic agriculture. We should have turned deserts into arable land. There are a lot of incredible things people expected to happen in the fifties and sixties that would have transformed the world.” But none of that happened. He argues that since the 1960s humanity has not produced major technological breakthroughs: the rise of the internet lost momentum and the iPhone was not a technological revolution but a commercial one. He is skeptical about AI’s transformative power, though he admits it is the only thing that could break the stagnation. For Thiel, true innovation comes from “creating markets where none existed before.”

Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Country of Lords, a book that examines how tech magnates contribute to inequality, recalls a statement from Thiel in her work: “I was growing up, I wanted to be the best, I wanted to go to these elite institutions. I went to law school, I had the straight and narrow path, but then I realized that all that was wrong, and actually you had to disrupt everything, create your own monopoly, a monopoly of one: nobody else can ever be you, and then the people who are kind of blessed with this genius to recognize how to create something completely new in the world, those are the people who will deserve to win in this race and deserve to command the resources of society.”

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