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Atlas Network is proud to announce that Rocío Guijarro, Executive Director of the Venezuelan free-market think tank CEDICE Libertad, will receive the 2026 Sir Antony Fisher Achievement Award at Liberty Forum & Freedom Dinner in New York City on November 12, 2026.

The Sir Antony Fisher Achievement Award is Atlas Network’s recognition for lifetime service to the cause of liberty, presented annually to think tank leaders, philanthropists, scholars, and freedom champions whose dedication has shaped pivotal chapters in the worldwide freedom movement.

This year, the award honors the leader of Venezuela’s most enduring voice for individual liberty, property rights, and free markets. For more than three decades, Rocío Guijarro has led CEDICE Libertad, a Caracas-based research institute dedicated to advancing classical liberal ideas in Venezuela, through a period in which nearly every other independent civic organization in the country was dismantled, co-opted, or driven into exile.

A Movement That Refused to Disappear

CEDICE Libertad was founded in 1984 by a group of Venezuelan entrepreneurs who believed that the ideas of individual liberty and free markets offered their country a better path. From a modest office in the Chamber of Commerce building in Caracas, they set out to translate and disseminate the works of classical liberal thinkers, build a community of like-minded Venezuelans, and lay the intellectual foundations for a freer society. Rocío Guijarro was there from the beginning, joining as a young woman to help build the organization from the ground up alongside its first executive director. When that director departed, Rocío assumed the role herself — and has led CEDICE ever since.

By the time Hugo Chávez launched his authoritarian socialist project, CEDICE had already spent years building the intellectual foundations for a freer Venezuela. What followed tested the institution as few think tanks anywhere in the world have been tested. The Chávez and Maduro regimes made no secret of their hostility toward CEDICE, seeking repeatedly to delegitimize an organization that defended the very principles they were determined to erase. They did not succeed. As Venezuela’s currency collapsed, as the press was silenced, and as colleagues across civil society were threatened, jailed, or forced abroad, CEDICE remained undaunted. It continued to publish, to convene, to teach, and to defend the convictions that the regime had every reason to want forgotten. Rocío and her team never stopped speaking out, and they never stopped believing their country would find its way back to freedom.

A Mentor to a Generation

Rocío has been one of the Ibero-American freedom movement’s most generous movement builders, a mentor to younger leaders from Mexico to Argentina to Spain, and a trusted ally of Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. For a generation of Venezuelan economists, journalists, reformers, and political leaders, many of whom 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.

A Movement Poised for Its Moment

For the first time in twenty-six years, liberty is advancing in Venezuela rather than retreating. The question of what a free Venezuela should look like, economically, legally, and 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.

“I have known Rocío Guijarro for more than twenty-five years, and I have watched her hold CEDICE together through circumstances that would have broken a lesser leader. While Venezuela descended into authoritarian socialism and so many colleagues were forced to leave, Rocío stayed, worked, and never stopped believing that her country would find its way back to freedom. That moment is closer than ever, and there is no one more deserving to be recognized as Rocío.” — Brad Lips, CEO, Atlas Network

Rocío Guijarro will be presented with the Sir Antony Fisher Achievement Award at Freedom Dinner on November 12 at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York City. Registration for Freedom Dinner is now open at AtlasNetwork.org/Events.