Watching her travel the world to meet with leaders in Europe, with businesspeople in California, or give interviews on YouTube, many may conclude that María Corina Machado, 58, is a leader in limbo, trapped in a situation that prevents her from returning to Venezuela. There, the mission she set for herself still awaits: carrying through the task of removing the Chavista regime from power. According to that view, every day she spends abroad is a gain for the siblings Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez, Venezuelan president and speaker of the National Assembly, respectively, and for strongman Diosdado Cabello —and rising pressure from the millions of Venezuelans waiting for her. But that is not the impression she conveys in person.

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It was a bilateral meeting, but a third country had a major interest in what was being discussed. The encounter on Friday April 24, in Caracas between the acting president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, and the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, wrapped with an important statement: the two countries will draw up joint military plans and open mechanisms to share intelligence “immediately.”

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There are two pairs of eyes that have shaped the lives of Venezuelans for more than two decades. Symbolic eyes, once adorning building facades, t-shirts, and the city’s staircases. They were the eyes of Hugo Chávez: a gaze designed to suggest authority, surveillance, omnipresence. A gaze that, even after his death in 2013, remained, as if power no longer needed a body, only presence.

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