Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, awarded with the Nobel Peace Price on Friday morning, has a decades-long track record of opposing the Venezuelan socialist regime established by late dictator Hugo Chávez and now led by Nicolás Maduro.
Machado dedicated her award to the people of Venezuela and to President Donald Trump for his “decisive” support of the Venezuelan cause.
Machado, an industrial engineer and former lawmaker, is the leader of Vente Venezuela, the only mainstream center-right party that exists in the country. She has remained in hiding since the aftermath of the fraudulent July 28, 2024, presidential election, facing continued threats of arrest from the Maduro regime under a litany of dubious allegations such as “treason to the fatherland.”
Most of the threats have typically come from Interior Minister and longtime suspected drug lord Diosdado Cabello, who has publicly threatened to retaliate against Machado for her support of American sanctions and political pressure against the rogue socialist regime. Cabello has derided Machado numerous times during his socialist talk show Hitting with the Mallet and has derogatively branded her as La Sayona, the name of a Venezuelan urban legend from the mid–19 century.
“She is receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy,” the Nobel Committee announced on Friday morning. “As the leader of the democracy movement in Venezuela, Maria Corina Machado is one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times.”
Machado was the Venezuelan opposition’s original frontrunner candidate for the 2024 sham election before Maduro banned her from participating as punishment for supporting international human rights sanctions on his regime. The Maduro regime originally imposed a spurious 12-month public office ban on her in 2015, accusing her of “irregularities” on her financial disclosure statements as a lawmaker, which she denied. The socialist regime used that as an excuse to retroactively extend the 12-month ban to “15 years” in 2023, effectively banning her from politics until 2030.
Despite the ban, Machado obtained an overwhelming 93 percent of the votes in the opposition’s October 2023 primary elections, with her closest rival getting less than five percent. Machado, after being unable to register her candidacy, designated 80-year-old academic Corina Yoris as her substitute for the sham election. Yoris, like Machado, was not allowed to run by the regime-controlled National Electoral Council (CNE).
As a last-minute resort, the Venezuelan opposition rallied around 75-year-old former diplomat Edmundo González, the only genuine opposition candidate that Maduro allowed to run in the election alongside other handpicked “rivals.” González originally signed up as a “placeholder” in the event that the Maduro regime fulfilled its “promise” to the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden to lift bans on opposition candidates in exchange for oil sanctions relief and other concessions. The Maduro regime “fulfilled” its promise by only lifting bans on approved “opposition” candidates, which excluded Machado.
Machado accompanied González on the campaign trail across the country ahead of the July 28 electoral event — a date specifically chosen by the Venezuelan regime as it marked the birthday of Maduro’s predecessor, late dictator Hugo Chávez. The ruling socialists have attempted to turn July 28 into a pseudo-national holiday celebrating their movement.
Maduro responded to Machado and González’s campaign with a brutal persecution effort that led to the unjust arrest of several Vente Venezuela members, including key members of Machado’s staff — some of whom sought shelter in the now-shutdown Argentine embassy in March 2024 and who were ultimately rescued in early May in what Secretary of State Marco Rubio described as a “precise operation.” Private restaurants and other service providers who welcomed Machado during the campaign were forcefully shut down and fined by the Maduro regime. In some cases, the regime sent socialist thugs to harass Machado and González and blocked roads preventing them from travelling.
Nicolás Maduro ultimately declared himself the “winner” of the sham election, securing an additional six-year term for himself that started on January 10, 2025. Machado and the Venezuelan opposition party heavily contested this outcome, presenting voter tallies allegedly obtained on the day of the election that, they claimed, show González defeating Maduro in a landslide.
The tallies remain in the custody of the government of Panama since January, although digital copies of the tallies can be accessed online. Machado would later explain that the tallies were collected thanks to the labor of the Comanditos (“Little Commands”), some 60,000 groups averaging ten people each that organized to collect the tallies and clandestinely scan and transmit the results on the day of the election, allowing Venezuelans to finally obtain tangible evidence of Maduro’s electoral fraud.
Neither Maduro, nor the electoral authorities under his control, ever published any form of documentation demonstrating he “won” the election. Peaceful protests immediately erupted in Venezuela after Maduro proclaimed himself “winner,” to which the dictator responded with even more brutal persecution. Machado has remained in hiding in Venezuela ever since, while González fled into exile to Spain in September 2024.
Machado was last publicly seen on January 9, 2025, when she participated in an opposition rally a day before Maduro was sworn in for his illegitimate term. On that day, Machado was briefly detained amid gunshots after departing the event and was allegedly forced to record a video asserting that she was “safe.” The video first began circulating on Venezuelan regime-affiliated social media accounts.
Venezuelan socialists had violently ousted Machado from her democratically-elected Congressional seat in 2014. In 2013, socialist lawmakers and thugs brutally attacked Machado inside the National Assembly, leaving her with four fractures in her nose. Current Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello was at the time the head of the Venezuelan parliament, and witnessed the attack.
Machado was also a fierce opponent of late dictator Hugo Chávez. One of Machado’s most notable clashes with Chávez took place in January 2012 when she, then serving as a lawmaker, confronted Chávez at the National Assembly over his mass expropriation — the forced seizure of private properties and associated acts of repression. Machado urged Chávez to debate her, to which Chávez refused because she was “out of ranking” and said, “an eagle does not hunt a fly.”
Machado has widely denounced the Iranian presence in Venezuela and its continued assistance of the Maduro regime, one of Iran’s key allies in the region. In February, Machado announced that individuals had broken into her home in Caracas soon after Donald Trump, Jr. had interviewed her on his Triggered podcast.
Machado’s recognition with a Nobel Peace Prize was celebrated by conservatives leaders worldwide, ranging from Argentine President Javier Milei, former President of Colombia Álvaro Uribe Vélez, and the leader of Spain’s VOX party Santiago Abascal, among several others.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
Read the full article here