Socialist dictator of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro insulted anti-socialist opposition leader María Corina Machado on Sunday after she won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, branding her a “demonic witch.”
Maduro delivered his rant about Machado on the tail end of his speech commemorating the “Day of Indigenous Resistance and Decolonization of the Americas,” a socialist “holiday” originally implemented by late dictator Hugo Chávez in 2002 to replace el Día de la Raza (Day of the Race), Venezuela’s decades-old historic iteration of Columbus Day.
Maduro, without directly mentioning her, referred to Machado as La Sayona, the name of a Venezuelan urban legend from the mid–19th century.
“Ninety percent of the entire population rejects the demonic witch of La Sayona. We want peace, and peace we shall have. But peace with freedom, with sovereignty, with independence, with dignity, and with equality,” he declared. “Not the peace of empires, the peace of the ruins of Gaza, not the peace of misery and hunger, not the peace of death and blood, no. Not the peace of domination, not the peace of the colonies, no.”
For years, Maduro and members of his authoritarian narco-socialist regime have used the name of La Sayona to refer to Machado in a derogatory manner, comparing her to the legend, who is usually depicted as a fair-skinned woman with straight black hair.
Maduro’s “indigenous resistance” and “anti-colonialism” event marked the dictator’s first public appearance since the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Machado the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday 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.”
Machado dedicated her award to the people of Venezuela and to President Donald Trump for his support of Venezuela’s fight to restore democracy in the country and his administration’s actions to curb the flow of Maduro’s illegal drug trafficking revenue. The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award Machado has been highly praised by conservatives worldwide and condemned by the international left.
“We are on the threshold of victory and today, more than ever, we count on President Trump, the people of the United States, the peoples of Latin America, and the democratic nations of the world as our principal allies to achieve Freedom and democracy,” Machado wrote on Friday.
Machado later explained to CBS News that she thinks it is fair to dedicate the Nobel Peace Prize to President Trump because of “what he has done, not only for the region, but for the world regarding freedom, democracy, and peace.”
Machado is the leader of Vente Venezuela, the country’s only mainstream center-right party, and has spent over two decades opposing the Venezuelan socialist regime, first led by Hugo Chávez and now by his chosen successor, Nicolás Maduro.
She has remained in hiding at an undisclosed location in Venezuela since the aftermath of Maduro’s July 28, 2024, sham presidential election, facing constant threats of arrest under dubious “treason to the fatherland” accusations by the ruling socialists. The regime has unjustly arrested several members of her party and persecuted key members of her staff.
Machado served as a lawmaker through 2014, when she was violently ejected from her democratically elected position by the socialist regime. A year later, in 2015, the Maduro regime banned her from running for office for a year on dubious grounds of alleged “irregularities” on her yearly financial disclosure statements to regime-controlled authorities, which she fiercely denied. The Maduro regime then used the initial ban as “justification” to punish Machado for her support of U.S. and international human rights sanctions against the rogue socialists. In 2023, the regime retroactively extended its one year ban to “15 years,” excluding Machado from political campaigning until 2030.
The retroactive ban prevented her from running against Maduro in the 2024 sham election despite Machado having obtained 93 percent of the votes in the opposition’s October 2023 primary election. After Maduro’s electoral authorities refused to allow 80-year-old academic Corina Yoris as Machado’s substitute in the sham election, she called upon Venezuelans to rally 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” candidate in the event that the Maduro regime kept its word to the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden, who generously awarded Maduro with a broad oil and gas sanctions relief package in exchange for vague promises of allowing Machado and others to run in a “free and fair” 2024 presidential election. Maduro did not keep his word to the Biden administration and upheld Machado’s ban in January 2024.
Throughout 2024, Machado and Vente Venezuela organized some 60,000 Comanditos (“Little Commands”), groups of about ten people each tasked with retrieving vote tallies, scanning them, transmitting the results over the internet, and securing the physical copies. The tallies, whose digital copies can be freely accessed on a website, indicate that González defeated Maduro in a landslide.
The socialist-controlled electoral authorities proclaimed Maduro the “winner” of the sham election but never published any tally or documentation that can corroborate the dictator’s declaration of “victory.”
Maduro then launched a brutal persecution campaign against dissidents, forced González into exile, and imposed a $100,000 bounty on him. Machado has remained in hiding since then. All physical copies of the vote tallies collected by the Venezuelan opposition remain under the custody of the National Bank of Panama since January.
According to Celso Amorim, Brazilian radical leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s top foreign policy adviser, Maduro personally promised him that he would present evidence that could demonstrate he “won” the sham election, but ultimately did not uphold his word, incurring a “breach of trust” that offended Lula, leading to him snubbing Maduro out of a highly-coveted spot at the BRICS anti-U.S. bloc in October 2024.
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