I did not join the freedom movement for ideological reasons, but because reality forced me to question what I had been taught. During my undergraduate years in Brazil, I was immersed in a predominantly left-leaning academic environment. That began to change when I joined a research project on oil regulation. For the first time, I was not dealing with abstract theories, but with real policies, real incentives, and real consequences. A professor, long dismissed for opposing the dominant model, introduced me to a different way of thinking. That was my turning point.

By 2019, I had moved to São Paulo to pursue my PhD, but my path was already expanding beyond Brazil. That same year, I interned at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, and became a fellow at the Mercatus Center. For the first time, I saw what a global freedom movement looked like in practice. It was not just a set of ideas, but a network of people building, debating, and acting across borders. When I returned to Brazil, I was determined to be part of that effort. I joined Livres in 2020, eager to contribute to change at home. At Livres, I was working at the center of Brazil's liberty movement, an organization dedicated to advancing free market ideas and individual freedom in Brazilian politics and public life.

It was through Atlas Network’s convenings of think tank leaders that my world expanded. Suddenly I was in regular contact with people doing this work in countries I had never visited, on problems I had never considered. I was shocked, in the best possible way, by the scale of it. There were so many people, from so many places, all pulling in the same direction.

That experience changed how I saw the work. It stopped being something local and became something global. It also changed how I approached it. I became more intentional about building relationships, learning from other organizations, and thinking beyond Brazil. I wanted to be part of all of it. My work with the Ladies of Liberty Alliance (LOLA) made that clear. LOLA is unique among organizations in the freedom movement because we are a global community of women advancing liberty in very different political realities. Today LOLA is in over 60 countries worldwide, including 17 in Latin America, where our members are finding bottom-up, civil society solutions to problems that governments across the region have long failed to solve.

LOLA gave me something I had been looking for since my early academic years: not just intellectual alignment, but shared purpose and coordinated action. That is also where my relationship with Atlas Network deepened. Atlas Network does not operate on the surface of the movement. It connects the people doing the work on the ground. Its training programs have been central to everything we have built. We are intentional about showing up wherever they happen. If there is a training in Africa, our African leaders attend. If there is one in Asia, our Asian leaders attend. Our president, Nena Whitfield, has participated in all of them. That investment in people is what turns a network into something real. Those relationships matter most when they are tested.

One of those moments came with María Oropeza. María is a Venezuelan lawyer and activist who was detained in August 2024 after openly supporting democratic opposition efforts. Most importantly, we are friends! Her arrest was part of a broader crackdown under what became known as Operation Tun Tun, a campaign targeting individuals involved in political mobilization. She was taken from her home without a warrant and held at El Helicoide, the same brutal detention center for political prisoners where Jesús Armas was confined.

From the beginning, it was clear that her case could not remain local. Without external pressure, stories like hers tend to disappear. That is when the network became operational. I was directly involved in her legal defense, but the legal strategy alone was not enough. Together with LOLA, we launched an international campaign to keep her name visible. Women across multiple countries mobilized, spoke publicly, and pushed the case into their own networks. Atlas Network supported this effort through grants that helped scale both advocacy and a documentary project
focused on her story. Rather than spontaneous, it was the result of years of building trust across organizations. After more than a year in detention, María was released in February 2026.

Her case became a concrete example of what coordinated international pressure can achieve. For me, that moment clarified something I had been building toward since that first university research project years ago when I realized I saw the world differently from my peers. Ideas matter, but networks make them real. The freedom movement is often described in terms of principles. My experience has been different. It is about people, relationships, and the ability to act when it matters most. That is what Atlas Network enables. And that is why those connections are not optional. They are essential.