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They Ran a Campaign in Hiding. Now They Wait.
The campaign officials for Venezuela’s opposition have sheltered in an Argentine diplomatic residence in Caracas for five months, watching the country’s turmoil from asylum.
Reporting from Bogotá, Colombia
Every morning they wake up and look at the mountains of Caracas. On days when protests fill the streets they can hear the chants. But they know that if they take one step outside their compound, they could be arrested and thrown in prison.
For the past five months, five top aides for the party of Venezuela’s opposition leader, María Corina Machado, have been living in an Argentine diplomatic residence where they sought asylum after the country’s attorney general announced warrants for their arrest.
And it is from this house, nestled between the diplomatic residences of Russia and North Korea, that Ms. Machado’s top aides have run one of the most consequential presidential campaigns in the country’s history.
Somehow, despite the constraints on their liberty, the five officials not only managed to help organize a voter turnout drive that brought millions of to the polls on Election Day but also mobilized thousands of monitors to collect tally sheets that could prove their candidate had won.
Their efforts helped lead the United States to recognize the opposition candidate, Edmundo González, as the winner, while many other countries have refused to recognize President Nicolás Maduro’s claim of victory.
And yet, despite all this, Mr. Maduro remains in power, and the five remain trapped inside the Argentine compound. They await official permission to leave the country.
It all started on March 20, when two top leaders of Ms. Machado’s party, Vente Venezuela, were arrested and sent to a notorious Venezuelan detention center known as the Helicoide.
The campaign had been on high alert for months. The autocratic Maduro government had agreed to free elections in October as part of a deal with the United States to lift crippling sanctions. But officials had been throwing up obstacles ever since, including intimidating opposition politicians.
Some opposition officials had previously gone into hiding temporarily, and most lived in a state of paranoia.
After the March 20 arrests, one opposition campaign official, Pedro Urruchurtu, worried that he and other top party officials would be next. Moving quickly, he reached out to all his diplomatic contacts in search of any embassy that would give them asylum.
One of those contacts was the deputy chief of mission for Argentina’s embassy, Gabriel Volpi.
“They’re looking for us,” Mr. Urruchurtu recalls telling him over the phone.
“Give me 15 minutes,” Mr. Volpi responded.
“If you can, make it 10,” Mr. Urruchurtu said.
“OK, deal.”
A plan was already in action by the time Venezuela’s attorney general announced at a news conference that he was issuing arrest warrants for Mr. Urruchurtu and four other party officials: Magalli Meda, Humberto Villalobos, Claudia Macero and Omar González. He also named Fernando Martínez Mottola, an adviser for a coalition of opposition parties.
Those who were in the capital, Caracas, immediately went into hiding and Mr. Volpi sent cars to bring them to the ambassador’s residence, where they would be granted protection by the Argentine government. (Argentina currently does not have an ambassador posted in Venezuela.)
Omar González, 74, who heads Ms. Machado’s campaign branch in his home state of Anzoátegui, was about to board a plane to Caracas for a work trip when his son called to tell him about the arrest warrant, he said in an interview. He had to make a split-second decision: Leave the airport or board the plane. He chose to stick with his travel plans, figuring he would be less recognizable in Caracas.
After he landed, he said he walked quickly through the airport without looking at anyone and got in the first cab he saw.
“Start driving,” he told the driver. “And then I’ll tell you where we’re going.”
Within 30 minutes, he said, he received instructions to head to the Argentine residence. When he arrived, he found that some of his colleagues were already there.
“It was as if I had seen angels,” he said.
As they settled into their new lives, the sense of relief was replaced by a sense of urgency. They still had a campaign to run, and so their time was filled with virtual meetings. They sometimes slept as little as four hours a day as the July 28 election neared.
Ms. Meda, Ms. Machado’s right-hand woman, once rode alongside the opposition leader as she traversed the country. Now she was making video calls in isolation.
“I like human contact,” Ms. Meda said. “I need to work with the teams. I am used to touching them, to seeing them, to knowing how they feel. To have headphones attached all day, I really feel sometimes that I’m going deaf. It is not my nature.”
In interviews, the five campaign officials said they felt lucky to have narrowly avoided the fate of their imprisoned colleagues, but described living in a state of constant tension and uncertainty knowing that at any moment their circumstances could change.
“It is a landscape that you have grown up with, a landscape that you know somehow belongs to you,” said Mr. Urruchurtu. “But at the same time, what tires you is that you can’t go beyond it.”
For Mr. Volpi and his wife, who had been living by themselves with their two dogs in the 41,000 square foot residence, the asylum seekers were welcome company. The eight of them quickly became like a family, he said.
They spent meals, birthdays and holidays together. The opposition leaders were not left alone without an Argentine diplomat present, in case the Maduro government tried to come in, Mr. Volpi said.
But after two months, Mr. Volpi left the residence for his planned retirement.
“I would have liked to stay with them until the end,” he said. They still have a group text chat where they talk each day, he said.
When the Venezuelan Supreme Court banned Ms. Machado from the ballot, the opposition party threw its weight behind an unknown candidate, a retired diplomat named Edmundo González, and convinced their voting base to vote for him.
As the vote grew closer, they watched as the Maduro government did still more to undermine the election, arresting not only activists and politicians but hotel and restaurant owners who offered services to the opposition campaign.
Then on election night, they watched as Mr. Maduro declared victory but did not provide any evidence to support the claim. Tallies collected by the election monitors showed that in fact Mr. González had won — and in a landslide.
“We moved a whole country to make decisions in a single route and with a single agenda,” said Ms. Meda.
The night after the election Venezuelan police officers appeared outside the Argentine residence. The campaign officials spent three nights watching through the windows as officers in bulletproof vests and face masks stood outside, sometimes dangling handcuffs, they said.
Ms. Meda said that those three nights “took years off my life.”
On Aug. 1, Mr. Maduro ordered the Argentine diplomats to leave the country and Brazil assumed responsibility for the embassy and the asylum seekers. The police left.
The opposition leaders have watched as the Venezuelan government has unleashed a wave of repression against anyone challenging their declared results. Human rights groups say it is more brutal than anything the country has seen in decades.
“These are very long nights of great pain,” said Ms. Meda. “It is madness what is happening.”
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