David Smolansky is the deputy director of the ConVzla Presidential Campaign, representing opposition leader María Corina Machado and President-Elect Edmundo González in Washington, D.C. He is an SNF Agora Institute fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Previously, he served as Mayor of El Hatillo in Caracas, earning recognition for transparency and crime reduction. His opposition to Maduro’s dictatorship led to arrest warrants, removal from office, a ban from public service, and exile. As the OAS special envoy for the Venezuelan migration crisis, he authored 15 reports and conducted over 20 official visits across 11 countries, advocating for policies to protect Venezuelan migrants. Smolansky holds a B.A. in Journalism from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello and a Master’s in International Public Policy from Johns Hopkins University. He was a visiting fellow at Georgetown and a Draper Hills Fellow at Stanford. His case has been presented to the International Criminal Court and cited in OAS and UN reports on crimes against humanity in Venezuela.
