Draft:Margarita Lopez Maya

Margarita López Maya (New York, 1951-). Venezuelan historian, with a doctorate in Social Sciences from the Central University of Venezuela. Lecturer, columnist and professor at the Center for Development Studies (CENDES) of the Central University of Venezuela. She is currently a retired professor at that institution.

She grew up in a family with a humanist vocation, his maternal grandfathers being Colombians who emigrated to the United States in 1920. Her mother, Emily Maya, born and educated in the United States, arrived in Venezuela in 1958, married Francisco López Octavio and lived in Caracas until her death. She has three siblings. Emily Maya was a lifelong English teacher at institutions such as the Venezuelan American Center, the San Ignacio School and the Merici Academy in Caracas. Her father was a native of Araure, Portuguesa state. His paternal grandparents migrated from Araure to Barquisimeto at the time of Juan Vicente Gómez. There they had a chimó factory. Later, but also in Gómez's time, his grandmother Luisa Octavio, widow of Juan de Dios López Cazorla, settled in Caracas. Francisco López Octavio and Emily Maya Mora married in New York in 1949 and lived there until 1958. Margarita arrived in Venezuela at the age of six in May 1958, months after the end of the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. She is married to Luis E. Lander. She has two daughters.

López Maya has been a lecturer at several universities both inside and outside Venezuela and a columnist for Venezuelan newspapers (Últimas Noticias, and Panorama), has received several academic awards and has published multiple books, chapters in academic books, and more than 60 articles in academic journals. Her field of research and teaching is the contemporary socio-historical and socio-political processes of Latin America, particularly Venezuela, focused on issues such as popular protest, new left-wing parties, political projects against hegemonies, social actors, and issues of conjuncture of the Chavista era.

She was director of the Venezuelan Journal of Economics and Social Sciences, member of the Directory Committee of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) and president of the Section of Venezolanist Studies of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). She was a member of the center for political studies of the Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB). And in 2022 she was elected vice president/president of LASA based in the city of Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

With a long academic career, López Maya has also belonged to civil society organizations. She has been a member of the Assembly of Provea and Aquí Cabemos Todos and also to the Group of Experts on Venezuela of the Institute For Integrated Transitions (IFIT).

Margarita met Hugo Chávez on March 25, 1996, two years before he was elected in the 1998 presidential elections, and interviewed him, but never had any further contact with him or the MBR-200. In 2004, she was a speaker of order during the session in the National Assembly after the results of the presidential recall referendum, and was a candidate for deputy for the Assembly in 2010 in Caracas, municipality of San Pedro for the Patria Para Todos party.

Works[edit] •	United States in Venezuela: 1945-1948 (revelations from the US archives) (UCV, 1996) •	From Black Friday to the recall referendum (Alfadil, 2005, 2006) •	Ideas for debating socialism in the twenty-first century (Grupo Alfa, 2007 and 2009) •	Participatory democracy in Venezuela. Origins, laws, perceptions and challenges (Centro Gumilla, 2011) •	The descomunal state. Conversations with Margarita López Maya by journalist David González. (El Nacional, 2013) •	The Sunset of Chavismo. Venezuela 2005-2015 (Editorial Alfa, 2016). •	Democracy for Venezuela: representative, participatory or populist? (Caracas, Editorial Alfa, 2022)