Venezuela's Nobel Peace Prize highlights the country’s democratic struggle

Opposition leader María Corina Machado’s win was received with both applause and criticism throughout the world

Originally published on Global Voices

María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition politician who has been in hiding since January this year, was awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, October 10. Her award marks Venezuela’s first individual Nobel Prize in any category; she is the second Latin American woman (after Guatemala’s Rigoberta Menchú) and the 19th individual female laureate in the prize's 124-year old history.

While Machado’s political career spans three decades, the Nobel Prize recognized her leadership during the Venezuelan 2024 presidential election, when she spearheaded one of Venezuela’s most ambitious civic electoral monitoring efforts: a nationwide initiative that proved essential in documenting and verifying Nicolás Maduro’s extensive electoral fraud.

The committee said, “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.” It added that Machado has been “a key, unifying figure in a political opposition that was once deeply divided,” but managed to find common ground when it came to advocating for free elections and representative government: “This is precisely what lies at the heart of democracy: our shared willingness to defend the principles of popular rule, even though we disagree.”

When Machado received the call at 3:00 a.m. local time, she could hardly believe the news. Her first words reflected the scale of the social organization that had emerged during the 2024 elections: “I thank you deeply, but I hope you understand this is a movement — an achievement of an entire society. I am just one person. I certainly don’t deserve it,” she told Kristian Berg Harpviken, secretary of the Nobel Committee, in a clip shared on social media.

Reactions to Machado’s win have been both supportive and critical. She continues to live in hiding following her brief and violent abduction by official security forces in January 2025, interacting with followers and journalists only through social media or video calls. Her restricted movement means she cannot freely engage with either her critics or her supporters to defend or explain herself.

A career defined by defiance; a campaign under siege

Machado is no newcomer to Venezuelan politics. A 58-year-old industrial engineer from Caracas, she first entered the public arena in 2002 through Súmate, an NGO devoted to electoral monitoring. The organization gained prominence after leading a campaign that gathered 3.2 million signatures to trigger the 2004 recall referendum against then-president Hugo Chávez.

Machado later pursued elected office, serving as an independent member of parliament from 2011 to 2014. In 2012, she founded Vente Venezuela, a center-right political movement that promotes liberal economic policies and individual freedoms. As El País noted in 2023, her political vision evokes that of Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan. Today, Vente Venezuela remains unrecognized as an official party by the country’s electoral authority and has become the most severely persecuted party in Venezuela.

Her rise to full leadership of Venezuela’s opposition came in 2024, after Machado decisively won the November 2023 primary meant to unite opposition forces behind a single presidential contender. Her victory, however, was short-lived: within days, the Maduro government disqualified her from public office, so she threw her support behind former diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia, who would ultimately appear on the ballot.

During the elections campaign, Machado helped organize a vast citizen-led monitoring network comprising more than half a million volunteers — many of them women — who tracked and verified voting tallies across the country. The data collected by her teams indicated a clear victory for González Urrutia, with roughly 70 percent of the vote, in sharp contrast to the National Electoral Council’s official declaration that Nicolás Maduro had been re-elected.

When the results were announced, Machado urged peaceful nationwide demonstrations but soon went into hiding amid escalating threats from state security forces. She maintained contact only through social media.

Following the disputed vote, Maduro’s government escalated its campaign of repression. Beyond consolidating the electoral fraud, authorities targeted protests in low-income neighborhoods with unprecedented force, resulting in 25 deaths, more than 2,000 detentions, and dozens of illegal raids under Operación Tun Tun.

Over 800 political prisoners remain unjustly detained in imprisonment centers to date, many of them victims of the 2024 post-electoral repression. This number includes human rights defenders, foreigners and even minors, further confirmed by the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela, which has been active in the country since 2019.

A boost for Venezuelan democracy?

Machado’s political career is not without controversy. In 2014, she was one of the leaders of La Salida, a wave of anti-government protests that became one of the most violently repressed episodes in Venezuela’s recent history.

Over the years, she has also aligned herself with right-wing international figures, maintaining a long, though distant relationship with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and currently backing an alliance with US President Donald Trump, whose administration has taken an aggressive stance toward Venezuela, including the deployment of warships in the Caribbean to target the so-called “Cartel de los Soles.”

Machado even thanked Trump in her speech in Spanish, then added in a post in English on X: “I dedicate the prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause!”

Polarized reactions, silenced coverage

Inside Venezuela, public celebrations for the Nobel Peace Prize were muted, with local independent media covering the news in a limited fashion. According to the National Syndicate for Press Workers, journalists from major outlets who did report on the award were subsequently threatened or temporarily suspended from their positions.

International social media reaction to the prize was mixed. Supporters celebrated Machado’s leadership and her commitment to non-violent protest during the contentious July 2024 elections, whereas critics challenged the characterization of her tactics as entirely “peaceful.”

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, the Argentinean recipient of the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to his country's last civil-military dictatorship (1976–1983), criticized Machado's nod towards Donald Trump:

Me preocupa que no hayas dedicado el Nobel a tu pueblo y sí al agresor de Venezuela. Creo Corina que tienes que analizar y saber dónde estás parada, si eres una pieza más del coloniaje de Estados Unidos, sometida a sus intereses de dominación, lo que nunca puede ser para el bien de tu pueblo.

I am concerned that you dedicated the Nobel to Venezuela’s aggressor, and not to your people. I believe Corina that you must analyze and know your standpoint, whether you are another piece of the United States’ colonialism, subjected to their domination interests. Something that can never bring good to your people.

Iria Puyosa, a Venezuelan Global Voices contributor and researcher, highlighted how the prize ultimately means a recognition for the long fight of fellow Venezuelans against the repression of Maduro’s rule, as well as that of his predecessor, Hugo Chávez:

Hoy, las reacciones de centenares de conocidos, amigos, colegas, compañeros de viaje, no me han dejado dudas. La gente siente que se trata de un premio a quienes han luchado durante más de 20 años por recuperar la democracia en Venezuela. Un premio para quienes no hemos cedido ante la persecución y la represión.

Today, reactions from hundreds of acquaintances, friends, colleagues, travel partners, left no doubts. People feel that it is a recognition for those who have fought for more than 20 years to recover Venezuela's democracy. A prize for those of us who have not given in to persecution and repression.

Venezuelan journalist Rafael Osío Cabrices, meanwhile, suggested that the Nobel Peace Prize has shifted the political landscape for the Maduro administration. In his view, with Machado now recognized internationally, any attempt to target her carries a higher diplomatic and political cost. At the same time, the prize exposes the limits of Maduro’s propaganda strategy, which seeks to portray him as a victim in response to Trump’s military deployments in the Caribbean.