Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for promoting democratic rights in her country and her struggle to achieve a transition to democracy, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.
Machado (58), was born in Caracas, Venezuela, on October 7th, 1967. She is an industrial engineer by training and her father was a prominent businessman in Venezuela’s steel industry. Her upper-class roots have made her a target of criticism from Venezuela’s governing socialist party.
Machado won a resounding victory in the opposition’s primary election in 2023 and her rallies attracted large crowds, but a ban from holding public office prevented her from running for president against Nicolás Maduro in an election in 2024 and she went into hiding.
The country’s electoral authority and top court say Maduro, whose time in office has been marked by a deep economic and social crisis, won the election, though they have never published detailed tallies.
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Machado emerged from hiding to make a brief appearance during a protest before Maduro’s inauguration in January. She was briefly arrested and then freed.
In 2002, while working in a steel maker owned by her family, she founded a group called Sumate, which initially focused on vote monitoring but evolved into a key opposition group over time.
In 2012, two years after her family’s business was expropriated by the government of Hugo Chávez, she was a candidate for the first time in an opposition primary to run against Chávez, a contest ultimately won by Henrique Capriles.
In 2023, she embarked on a fresh presidential run, featuring threadbare campaign events, mostly in smaller towns, that ultimately propelled her to victory in the party’s primary, winning more than two million votes.
Her campaign tour, undertaken by car or sometimes on foot, with limited resources, brought her closer to her supporters even as a government prohibition on her candidacy forced her party to pass the torch to ally Edmundo González, a little-known former diplomat and academic.
Gonzalez, currently exiled in Madrid, shared a video on social media where he can be seen talking to Machado and celebrating her Nobel Prize.
“I’m in shock. I can’t believe this ... My God!”, Machado can be heard saying through her cell phone.
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González, who sought diplomatic refuge and moved to Spain in September 2024 after claiming he could have been jailed or tortured had he stayed in Venezuela, has sought to maintain a close relationship with Machado. She has said they often chat about the “fight for liberty”.
González was widely seen as the victor in the 2024 presidential election, but Maduro’s government declared him the winner and he has retained power. A number of countries do not recognise Maduro’s government as legitimate, including the US and European Union.
Machado advocates for liberal economic reforms, including the privatisation of state-owned enterprises such as PDVSA, Venezuela’s oil company. She also supports the creation of welfare programmes aimed at aiding the country’s poorest citizens.
“I hope you understand this is a movement, this is an achievement of a whole society,” Machado said in a call where she was officially informed that she had won the peace prize.
Though sometimes criticised for being stubborn – even by her own mother – Machado rarely speaks about herself in public. Instead, she frames her campaign as a collective struggle for redemption and unity, aiming to inspire hope among Venezuelans weary of economic hardship and social decay.
Her political activism has come at a cost, leaving her isolated as nearly all of her senior advisers have been detained or forced to leave the country. Machado herself has accused Maduro’s administration of operating as a “criminal mafia”.
