A car recently pulled up in front of a modest restaurant in Guarico state, in Venezuela’s vast savannah, and the driver yelled into the wheel: “Are you the ones that the government closed down your restaurant? I want to take a photo with you!”
The man jumped out of his car, approached one of the restaurant owners, Corina Hernandez, 44, and took a selfie with her. “We are all outraged,” he told her.
Corina and her sister, Elise Hernandez, have emerged as unlikely political heroes as Venezuela heads into its most bitter elections in years.
Their transgression? Selling 14 breakfasts and some empanadas to the country’s opposition leader. Just hours later, the government responded by ordering the sisters to temporarily close their business.
Their case is Widely shared Online, the sisters have become a symbol of rebellion for Venezuela’s citizens fed up with its authoritarian leader. Online Follow They have rebranded their product as “Freedom Empanadas” and have reached far beyond Venezuela.
But their company is just one of several that have felt the government’s powerful influence after providing daily services to Maria Corina Machado, President Nicolas Maduro’s main political opponent.
Machado, a former lawmaker and longtime critic of Maduro, is not even running for office but is using his popularity to campaign on his behalf, alongside the main opposition presidential candidate.
And wherever she goes on her campaign trips, her supporters have been harassed by authorities, including in recent weeks six sound equipment operators at rallies, a truck driver picking up supplies for the Caracas campaign, and four canoe men who provided transportation in impoverished Venezuelan outposts.
In interviews, they said they were detained for hours and taken to notorious detention centres known as helicopter pads, and some had their equipment confiscated, their businesses closed and their livelihoods taken away.
“We had nothing to eat during those days,” truck driver Francisco Exeso said, describing the 47 days his vehicle was impounded by police.
Given the country’s decline in democracy in recent years, opposition figures and analysts say such petty persecutions are a clear sign that the government is seeking new ways to suppress the opposition and project power.
Whatever the motivation, there is widespread agreement that the vote, scheduled for July 28, will be the biggest electoral challenge to Maduro’s 11-year grip on power.
For the first time in years, the opposition has coalesced around a figure who enjoys widespread support among voters. After Maduro’s government barred him from running, his coalition managed to get Edmundo Gonzalez, a quiet former diplomat, to run in his place.
According to a poll A majority of Venezuelans plan to vote for Gonzalez, saying they are frustrated by hunger, poverty and a surge in migration that is separating families.
The Hernandez sisters run the restaurant Pancho Grill in Coloso Pando, a small town five hours’ drive south of Caracas and one of the poorest regions in the country. The Hernandez family has five sisters and brothers, two of whom, Corina and Elise, run the restaurant with their aunt Nazareth.
Here, after the economic crisis that began around 2015, people who once had decent jobs now eke out a living by scrounging for junk to sell, and mothers have taken to hunting small pig-like rodents called bakiros, or picres as they are known locally, to feed their children.
The Hernandez family has run Pancho Grill for 20 years, selling a breakfast of beef, eggs, beans and corn cakes called arepas to anyone who can afford it.
A staple of the Venezuelan diet, empanadas are deep-fried, crispy and hot out of the pan, stuffed with cheese, beef or chicken and served with a generous dollop of aji dulce salsa, made with the country’s favorite red chili pepper.
Their workplace bears the scars of the economy’s freezing weather: leaks in the ceilings have left the kitchen rusty, the refrigerator is broken and long power outages mean the Hernandez women often have to work in the dark.
During a campaign stop in late May, Machado and his team stopped by Pancho Grill to buy breakfast and pose for a photo with the Hernandez family.
But as soon as the opposition leaders left the store, the sisters received new visitors: two tax officials and a member of the National Guard, who said they were temporarily closing the store.
Officials said the sisters had not kept accounting books or reported their income.
The sisters did not dispute the charges, but said they had never received a visit from the tax office in 20 years of business, and no one else in town had been inspected that day in an area where such violations are commonplace.
The Hernandez family was told the restaurant would be closed for 15 days.
Representatives for the tax office did not respond to emails seeking comment.
At first, the Hernandez sisters were shocked, but then they recorded their conversation with the regulators and sent it to one of their daughters, who thought it would be a good idea to share the family’s experience with some friends.
video Spreading rapidly onlineSoon, outraged supporters were making a pilgrimage to the restaurant, with donations lined up at the door, from spices to flavor the empanada filling to 33 pounds of corn flour, then donations started pouring in from Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and even as far away as Germany.
Many people placed orders for empanadas and instructed their families to distribute them to locals in need.
Speaking recently from her restaurant, Corina Hernandez tweeted that Machado may have been sent to them by God. The government’s retaliation had, paradoxically, been a blessing.
“Our lives changed when Maria Corina came to buy empanadas,” she says. “Everything became better.”
After being closed for 15 days, the sisters reopened the restaurant and, with the help of new donors, paid the $350 fine, they said. Hernandez said she hasn’t voted since 2006, when she voted for Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez. (Maduro was Chavez’s handpicked successor as president.)
But now, she said, a fine from tax authorities has convinced her that she must go to the polls on July 28 to vote for the opposition this time.
The Hernández family is back in business, but not everyone who has clashed with the government has been so lucky.
Six sound engineers were held for hours, fearing they could be locked up for years, one of them said in an interview. In Zulia state, on the country’s western edge, a “closed” sign was posted on the door of the hotel where Machado’s team was staying.
One restaurant employee said he was forced to cancel planned First Communion celebrations at two restaurants, resulting in huge losses.
A five-hour drive south of Pancho Grill in Apure state, next to the National Guard headquarters, a wooden boat confiscated by authorities lies overturned and abandoned on the beach.
A few days earlier, Ms. Machado had arrived in the town of Puerto Paez, in the state of Apure. Local activists walked the streets with megaphones to announce her presence. Townspeople attached yellow balloons to a truck from which Ms. Machado addressed voters. The streets were packed.
The next day, four motorized canoe men agreed to transport Machado and his team to the next campaign stop. According to interviews with three of the canoe men, the boat was impounded shortly thereafter, and then the National Guard showed up at one of their homes, where two guards told the canoe man’s wife they had “orders from the bosses in Caracas” and were going to arrest her husband.
He was not at home because he was hiding, and now the boatmen move from house to house, sleeping in a different place every night.
Representatives for the National Guard did not respond to emails seeking comment.
But his wife, who asked not to be named for fear of further retaliation, said her husband had made the right decision to deport Machado. “I have no regrets,” she said.
“I trust in God that she will win,” she said of Machado, who many voters see as a real political force behind Gonzalez, “and I believe that will change everything.”
