For more than three decades, Rocío Guijarro has led CEDICE Libertad, the Caracas-based research institute that has stood as Venezuela’s most enduring voice for individual liberty, property rights, and free markets. She has done so through a period in which nearly every other independent civic organization in the country was dismantled, co-opted, or driven into exile.

Founded in 1984, CEDICE was already a fixture of Venezuelan intellectual life before Hugo Chávez’s authoritarian socialist project began its long campaign against free thought, free enterprise, and free people. Under Rocío’s stewardship, CEDICE became more than a research institute. It became a freedom movement that refused to disappear. As Venezuela’s currency collapsed, as the press was silenced, as colleagues across Venezuelan civil society were threatened, jailed, or forced abroad, CEDICE continued to publish, to convene, to teach, and to defend the convictions that Chávez—and after him, Nicolás Maduro—had every reason to want forgotten.

This was not safe work. Leading a classical liberal organization in authoritarian socialist Venezuela meant accepting personal exposure as a condition of the job. Rocío accepted it. She has been one of Venezuela’s most generous movement-builders, as well as a mentor to younger leaders from across the Ibero-American freedom movement, from Mexico, to Argentina, to Spain. Readers will encounter her influence elsewhere in this issue: both Jesús Armas and María Alejandra Márquez credit Rocío with bringing them into the movement, and opposition leader María Corina Machado has long counted her as a trusted ally. For a generation of Venezuelan economists, journalists, reformers, and political leaders—many of whom have spent years operating in exile or in waiting— CEDICE was the place that did not flinch, and Rocío was the leader who made room for them there.

That patience is now meeting its moment. For the first time in 26 years, liberty is advancing in Venezuela rather than retreating. Nothing is guaranteed, and Venezuela ’s transition will be shaped by forces no single organization can control. But the question of what a free Venezuela should look like—economically, legally, civically—is no longer abstract. It is the question of the next decade, and the answer will be shaped, in significant part, by the people Rocío kept ready for this moment. The Sir Antony Fisher Achievement Award is Atlas Network ’s lifetime recognition of those whose dedication has shaped pivotal chapters in the worldwide freedom movement. In Rocío Guijarro, the award honors the courage to defend liberty through a long darkness, and the readiness to help carry it forward now that the road has opened.

Rocío will be presented with the Sir Antony Fisher Achievement Award at Liberty Forum & Freedom Dinner in New York City on November 12. Join us in recognizing Rocío ’s extraordinary contributions to liberty by registering here.