In Venezuela’s spacious savanna, a car just pulled up outside a humble restaurant. The driver yelled from behind the roller,” Are you the people whose business was shut down by the government?” I want to take a photo with you.”
Bounding out of the vehicle, the gentleman pulled near to Corina Hernández, 44, one of the owners of the restaurant. He snapped a picture. ” We are all offended”, he told her.
Just as Venezuela approaches its most aggressive vote in a long time, Corina and her girlfriend Elys Hernández have come out as doubtful political folk heroes.
Their sin? selling the region’s most influential opposition figure 14 meals and a few empanadas. Just days after, the sisters were ordered to temporarily shut down their businesses by the government.
Their situation was widely discussed online, turning them into rebellion for Venezuelans who were fed up with the country’s autocratic rulers. The daughters have since expanded their net following well beyond Venezuela and renamed their goods “freedom empanadas.”
However, Mara Corina Machado, President Nicolás Maduro’s major political player, and their business is just one of many that have felt the government’s stronghold after providing daily services to her.
Ms. Machado, a former legislator and longtime critic of Mr. Maduro, is n’t even running, but she is capitalizing on her popularity to campaign alongside and on behalf of the leading opposition presidential candidate.
And the people who help her are harassed by the government wherever she goes on the plan path. Six audio equipment technicians at a march, a truck driver bringing products to a campaign event in Caracas, and four people with canoes who provided transportation in an impoverished Cuban island were just a few examples of those who were targeted in subsequent weeks.
Some individuals have been detained for time, they said in discussions, dragged in to a famous detention facility known as the Helicoide. Others have had technology seized and firms shuttered, stripping them of their lives.
” Those time we had nothing to eat”, said the truck drivers, Francisco Ecceso, of the 47 times he said his car was held by the authorities.
For minor persecutions are clear indications that the government is looking for new ways to reduce the opposition and display its strength, according to opposition figures and analysts, who have witnessed the country’s democracy declining in recent years.
Whatever the desire, there is widespread agreement that the ballot, scheduled for July 28, poses the biggest political issue to Mr. Maduro’s 11- time hold on power.
For the first time in a long time, the opposition is unified around Ms. Machado, a person with widespread voter support. When Mr. Maduro’s government barred her from running, her coalition managed to get a surrogate on the ballot, a soft- spoken former diplomat named Edmundo González.
Polls show that a majority of Venezuelans plan to vote for Mr. González, and that they are frustrated by widespread hunger, poverty and soaring levels of migration, which have forced families apart.
The Hernández sisters operate their restaurant, Pancho Grill, in the small town of Corozo Pando, a five- hour drive south of Caracas, in one of the poorest parts of the country. In all, there are five Hernández siblings — four sisters and a brother — and two of them, Corina and Elys, operate the restaurant, along with their aunt Nazareth.
People who once had decent jobs now make a living searching for junk to sell, and mothers have resorted to hunting small pigs like báquiros and rodents known locally as picures to feed their children, as a result of an economic crisis that started around 2015.
The Hernández family has run Pancho Grill for 20 years, selling breakfasts of pulled beef, eggs, beans and corn cakes called arepas to those who can afford them.
Empanadas, a staple of the Venezuelan diet, come fried and crunchy, piping hot from the pan, stuffed with cheese, beef or chicken and served with a generous portion of ajà dulce salsa — made with the country’s preferred red pepper — on the side.
The Hernandez women’s workplace is in the dark because of a ceiling leak, broken refrigerators, and prolonged power outages.
In between campaign events, Ms. Machado and her team stopped at Pancho Grill in late May to buy breakfast and pose for photos with the Hernández family.
The sisters ‘ new visitors, two tax regulators and a National Guardsman, who claimed they were temporarily shutting the business down, arrived just as the opposition leader had left.
The sisters were informed by the officials that they had, among other things, failed to keep accounting records or to report their income.
The sisters did not dispute these accusations. But in their two decades in operation, they had never received a visit from the tax agency, they said. No one else in the town was inspected that day in a region where such infractions are commonplace.
The restaurant’s closure date was announced for the Hernández family.
Representatives from the tax agency did not respond to an email asking for comment.
Initially, the Hernández sisters were devastated. But they had filmed their interaction with the regulators, and sent it to one of their daughters. The young woman decided it was wise to share the family’s story with a few friends.
The video spread quickly online, and soon, outraged supporters were visiting the restaurant as if making a pilgrimage. Donations appeared at the door: spices to season empanada fillings, a 33- pound bag of corn flour. Then funds began rolling in from Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and even as far as Germany.
Many people placed orders for empanadas, giving family members instructions on how to distribute them among the city’s needy residents.
At her restaurant recently, Corina Hernández mused that Ms. Machado might have been sent to them by God himself. Government retaliation had, paradoxically, become a blessing.
” Our lives changed after MarÃa Corina arrived to buy our empanadas”, she said. ” Everything got better”.
After the 15- day closure, the sisters reopened the restaurant and paid a$ 350 fine with help from their new supporters, they said. Ms. Hernández said that she had not voted since 2006, when she cast her ballot for Hugo Chávez, Mr. Maduro’s predecessor. ( Mr. Maduro was Mr. Chávez’s handpicked choice to succeed him as president. )
She claimed that the tax authorities had now persuaded her that she must turn up on July 28 to support the opposition.
Though the Hernández family is back in business, not everyone who has had run- ins with the government has been so fortunate.
The six sound operators spent hours in detention, terrified that they’d be locked up for years, one of the men said in an interview. In the state of Zulia, on the country’s western edge, hotels that had hosted Ms. Machado’s team now have” closed” signs posted on their doors.
One staff member claimed that the business had lost a significant amount of money as a result of being forced to halt First Communion celebrations scheduled for its two restaurants.
A wooden boat that the authorities confiscated sits upside down on a beach next to a National Guard command station in the state of Apure, south of Pancho Grill, for five hours.
Days earlier, Ms. Machado had arrived in the town of Puerto Páez, Apure. Local organizers had used megaphones to announce her presence on the streets, and residents had hung yellow balloons on a truck that she later used as a platform to address voters. The streets were filled with people.
Four boatmen with motorized canoes agreed the following day to take Ms. Machado and her team to their next campaign stop. According to interviews with three of the boatmen, the boats were soon taken away, and the National Guard later went to one of their homes. There, two Guardsmen told a boatman’s wife that they had come with “orders from the bosses in Caracas” and sought to arrest her husband.
He was n’t home, because he had gone into hiding. Now, the boatmen move from house to house, sleeping in a different place each night.
The National Guard representatives did not respond to an email asking for comments.
The wife, who declined to be identified out of fear of reprisals, claimed that her husband had chosen the best course of action for Ms. Machado’s transportation. ” I do n’t regret it”, she said.
” I have faith in God that she is going to win”, she said of Ms. Machado, whom many voters recognize as the true political force behind Mr. González,” and that everything is going to change”.
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