Tinpot dictator alert :: Publius Pundit
Maria Corina Machado - a woman to be reckoned with

Quote:

She is a trained engineer - brilliant - who dumped her career to first run an orphanage for the poor, and then to start a small non-government-organization to ensure clean, fair elections. She’s never taken a side publicly on sides, she was only interested in the election process being fair. Her organization was called Sumate.

The U.S. Congress, hearing of her good work, gave her $36,000 in organizational money from the National Endowment for Democracy to keep trying to strengthening Venezuela’s democratic institutions, so that through this kind of civil society work, (instead of armed struggle), the country would become a stronger democracy and not a dictatorship.

That’s all it was about.

To Hugo Chavez, that was a crime. That’s why she’s threatened with 16 years’ prison — Venezuelan prison.