In early January 2026, the impossible happened in Venezuela. After decades of suffocating oppression, the image of dictator Nicolás Maduro being extracted by the U.S. government flashed across the globe. For María Alejandra Marquez, the head of the independent Venezuelan news outlet ​El Tiempo​, the sight was overwhelming.

“Maduro in prison fatigues. With cuffs. It brought tears to my eyes,” María Alejandra says. “It was a game changer.” She pauses. “Sometimes when I’m down, when I’m sad, I think: Maduro is in jail. So I can go on.”

That capacity to go on is the story of ​El Tiempo​ itself. For 67 years, the outlet has served eastern Venezuela’s four states as a trusted community voice. For the last 27 of those years, it has done so under conditions designed to make survival impossible. That it still exists today, leaner, digital, and more determined than ever, is the result of courage, creativity, and a long partnership with Atlas Network that proved decisive when it mattered most.

A LEGACY BUILT ON CONVICTION

El Tiempo​ was founded in 1958 with the birth of Venezuelan democracy, in the aftermath of the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, a regime that had made a political prisoner of María Alejandra’s father, a journalist who studied law specifically to help organize and protect Venezuela’s free press. He purchased ​El Tiempo​ in 1978 with a circulation of 2,000 copies. Seven years later, when he died, it was printing 75,000 daily and had become a genuine civic institution across the region.

María Alejandra eventually took the helm, committing fully to the newspaper just as Hugo Chávez won the presidency in 1998. The fight that would define the next three decades of her life had begun. “The challenges began immediately,” she says. “That’s when I realized I needed to leave my other endeavors and go completely to the newspaper.”

Her preparation for that fight had begun even earlier. Through her engagement with CEDICE Libertad, Venezuela’s leading pro-liberty think tank, María Alejandra had developed a clear framework for understanding what authoritarian control actually looks like in practice. When Chávez moved to dismantle Venezuela’s institutions, she recognized the pattern immediately.

THE STRATEGY OF SUFFOCATION

What followed was not a single dramatic assault on press freedom but a slow, deliberate campaign of institutional strangulation. The Chávez government, flush with oil revenue that at its peak reached $110 per barrel against a national budget calculated at $40, used the enormous surplus to penetrate every corner of civic life, including its media.

The most direct lever was newsprint. By monopolizing its importation, the government could dictate exactly how much paper any outlet was allowed to purchase. El Tiempo had once printed forty tons of paper daily. Eventually, the government set that same quantity as its entire annual allotment. Circulation collapsed. Audience evaporated. More than 400 media outlets across Venezuela closed entirely.

When Maduro succeeded Chávez, subtlety gave way to shamelessness. New taxes appeared constantly, on property ownership regardless of whether it generated income, on every asset a business possessed, on using dollars as currency, on the physical size of outdoor signage. El Tiempo eventually had to remove its own name from its building because the cost had become financially absurd. A staff of 360 shrank to 20.

“There is no better control on freedom, especially the freedom of expression, than to just destroy the economy,” María Alejandra said. “When you’re worried about whether you’re going to be able to eat or send your kids to school, you’re not concerned about freedom."

EXERCISING THE MUSCLE

El Tiempo responded by adapting without surrendering. The outlet moved fully digital, distributing content through online platforms including Instagram and WhatsApp in a country with some of the slowest internet speeds on the continent.

Editorial decisions moved from the top down to the ground up, with journalists in the field determining what they were willing to cover and what risks they were prepared to take.

Most strategically, El Tiempo focused its coverage on hyper-local public accountability—water quality, electricity outages, failing services—rather than national politics, which had become genuinely dangerous to touch.

Local authorities, unlike national ones, still maintained some connection to their communities. Pressure worked. “When we come and report on it,” one team member told María Alejandra, “the authorities move faster. They come and solve the problems faster.” It gave citizens the experience of using their voices and seeing them matter.

“The freedom of expression, like any liberty, needs to be exercised,” María Alejandra said. “It’s like a muscle. If people are not used to doing it, they don’t think they need it.”

Seeking out other Venezuelans and Latin American leaders who also wanted to exercise that muscle, María Alejandra began her involvement with Atlas Network’s conferences, trainings, and convenings across the region in 2022.

THE 2024 CRACKDOWN

The stolen election of July 2024 brought everything to a head.

After the regime banned opposition leader María Corina Machado from running, Edmundo González carried the democratic movement’s banner to a victory so decisive and so thoroughly documented by poll witnesses across the country that the regime could not plausibly contest the results.

Instead, it simply refused to show them, shutting down the electoral results portal and unleashing a wave of repression. In the months that followed, some 2,000 people were detained—not only journalists and politicians, but ordinary citizens whose only offense was participating in the democratic process.

It was a number that fit a grim pattern: over the entire course of Maduro’s rule, more than 18,000 Venezuelans had been held as political prisoners. Fear descended quickly. El Tiempo’s team, energized and active in the lead-up to the vote, went quiet almost overnight. But fear and determination are not mutually exclusive, and some pressed on.

In El Tiempo’s own hometown, a group of young men playing with water during carnival were arrested by intelligence officers who believed they were celebrating Maduro’s downfall. Their families reached out to El Tiempo. The team brought the question back to them: do you want this published? They did. It ran. The boys were released the following day.

“It was a joint process,” María Alejandra said. “With the families, with the organizations, with our team. A mistake in this can cost a lot.”

It was in this climate of intensifying repression that El Tiempo came closest to collapse. María Alejandra said they were very close to actually closing doors.

ATLAS NETWORK AS A LIFELINE

When the crackdown pushed El Tiempo to the edge, a long-standing relationship became something more urgent. Atlas Network maintains the capacity to deploy rapid response grants to partner organizations on the front lines of the fight for freedom, providing support precisely when and where the cause needs it most. For El Tiempo, that support kept the team active, sustained its public accountability work, and enabled it to reach remote communities it had never previously served.

As a family-owned outlet making the transition into the nonprofit world for the first time, El Tiempo found in Atlas Network not just resources but genuine partnership, guidance through an unfamiliar landscape offered
not prescriptively but as a two-way conversation.

What that meant in practice, María Alejandra said, is difficult to overstate. “It is an assurance that what we do is important. It brings self-esteem to our work. It brings hope. It brings the capacity to dream.” She noted that in crisis environments, support typically flows to large organizations in capital cities with established track records.

“It really takes a wider vision to be able to see what we do and connect it with the broader purpose of Atlas Network.” That wider vision, she said, is what Atlas Network’s donors make possible. “What you do changes lives,” María Alejandra said. She adds that by channeling that generosity through Atlas Network’s worldwide community of organizations, donors can trust their investment will accomplish far more than any single grant could on its own. “The way Atlas Network works, you feel more committed to providing results, to showing that we can have an impact.”

THE WORK IS JUST BEGINNING

“What we do is not an end,” María Alejandra said. “It’s just another step. And there are always more things we can all do together.” For El Tiempo, that means pressing forward in a Venezuela where the future remains unwritten but possibility has returned. “This is the moment of really trying hard for what we want, which is to achieve democratic transition, elections, and a freer society, where we are able not only to express ourselves, but to vote and to thrive