Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, a pro-democracy activist who has been in hiding for most of the past year, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her long crusade to fight dictatorship in the country.
Machado, 58, is in some ways an unusual choice for the Nobel committee: She is conservative, and cites Margaret Thatcher as an inspiration. She is known for her pugnacious approach to fighting the regime. And she has been close to the Trump administration and Republican presidents going back to George W. Bush, often advocating for Washington to confront the Venezuelan government more forcefully.
But she has also been a fearless advocate for democracy in a country that turned from a semi-authoritarian state into a brutal dictatorship in the past 20 years. Announcing the prize, Nobel Committee Chairman Jorgen Watne Frydnes described Machado, 58, as a “brave and committed champion of peace…who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness.”
“Oh my god,” Machado said when she received a call before dawn Thursday from Kristian Berg Harpviken, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute. “Well, I have no words. Thank you so much but I hope you understand this is a movement, this is [an] achievement of a whole society. I am just one person.”
The announcement comes as a blow to President Trump, who has long coveted the annual prize. In meetings and speeches, he has often mentioned the honor and complained that he hasn’t received it. That campaign ramped up after Trump announced a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas earlier this week, a development that likely came too late for the apolitical Nobel committee.
Nominations for the prize usually close in January.
“President Trump will continue making peace deals, ending wars, and saving lives,” White House communications director Steven Cheung said Friday on X. “The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace.”
Other favorites for the 2025 prize included volunteers from Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms, Russian opposition leader Yulia Navalnaya and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The award is a setback for the Venezuelan government and its strongman, Nicolás Maduro, who has drawn the country closer to U.S. rivals such as Russia, Iran and China.
“We are on the threshold of victory,” Machado said on X, “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 main allies in achieving freedom and democracy.”
Julio Borges, a leading opposition figure who fled Venezuela and is now in Spain, said that the recognition of Machado’s work “magnifies this struggle and reduces Maduro to something microscopic—surrounded by corruption, organized crime, and anti-democratic allies.”
The prize comes as the Trump administration has ratcheted up military pressure on the regime, which the administration accuses of narco-terrorism for helping ferry tons of illegal drugs to the U.S. It has deployed warships to the Caribbean to target alleged drug traffickers and carried out a series of deadly strikes on Venezuelan boats allegedly ferrying drugs—attacks that Machado has supported even as some rights groups have deemed them as extrajudicial executions. The U.S. this year raised a bounty for Maduro’s arrest to $50 million, more than it offered for Osama bin Laden. The Maduro government has accused the U.S. of preparing for an invasion to topple it.
While Machado has been close to the Trump administration, she has been criticized by some Venezuelans for not speaking out more on behalf of Venezuelan migrants in the U.S. The administration is seeking to end deportation protections against hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants, most of whom fled the regime Machado is fighting.
Machado, a former industrial engineer who worked in the car industry before becoming a mother, has worked tirelessly for democracy. The first half of that struggle was to preserve the country’s fragile democracy from the growing power of the late strongman Hugo Chávez, who led the country from 1999 until his death in 2013. The last half has been to resurrect it under Chávez’s successor, Maduro, who has twice held national elections that observers and foreign governments such as the U.S. say were rigged or blatantly unfair.
Along the way, the once oil-rich country has been left in ruin, with eight million people having fled abroad and its once thriving economy plagued by shortages and inflation.
Machado struggled for years alongside a fractured opposition in countering Chavez, a charismatic populist who rode a wave of popular anger at a corrupt political establishment to power in 1999. Venezuela’s opposition was plagued by infighting and an image as elitist and out of touch with ordinary Venezuelans. Much of the opposition argued that the best way to defeat Chavismo was to also move to the left.
Machado set out to prove that wrong. As Chavez and then Maduro tightened their grip on the economy and gutted democratic institutions like the courts and media, Machado plunged into the barrios that formed the bedrock of Chavismo. Her message to the poor: That Chavez and Maduro’s Socialist governments had made their lives worse, with crime soaring, the economy tanking and their children facing a bleak future.
She developed a reputation as a fighter. In 2012, Chavez had been talking for longer than seven hours to the National Assembly when he was interrupted by Machado on live television.
“We’ve been hearing you talk for eight hours about a country that is very far from what all women and Venezuelan mothers are living,” she told him, describing how families couldn’t afford food. “Tell the truth to Venezuela. There’s a decent Venezuela that wants a profound transformation. Now is the time to be serious and responsible and confront this challenge we have. Your time is over.”
She asked for a debate about key issues, to which Chavez suggested she wasn’t important enough to debate, replying: “Eagles don’t hunt flies.”
As her popularity grew in recent years, the government banned her from running against Maduro during the July 2024 election. She ended up backing Edmundo González, a little-known member of a different party. Despite being blocked from standing, she mobilized hundreds of thousands of volunteers to act as election observers at polling stations, where the volunteers kept poll tally sheets with QR codes that showed a comfortable González victory. Electoral observers said their independent tallies confirmed the opposition’s win.
Maduro claimed victory anyway, leading to widespread allegations of voter fraud and protests, during which roughly 25 people were killed and thousands arrested. González went into exile in Spain but Machado stayed in Venezuela, going into hiding.
“I am writing this from hiding, fearing for my life, my freedom, and that of my fellow countrymen from the dictatorship led by Nicolás Maduro,” she wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion column after the 2024 election.
Despite the threats against her life and liberty, Machado vowed to fight on.
“I call on those who reject authoritarianism and support democracy to join the Venezuelan people in our noble cause,” she wrote. “We won’t rest until we are free.”
Since then, she has continued to deliver public speeches from an undisclosed location, trying to keep hopes alive for a democratic transition in a country where arbitrary detention and rampant human-rights abuses by the regime’s shock troops have largely crushed civil society and opposition protest movements.
Earlier this year, she turned up by surprise at an opposition rally, and as she was leaving, her motorcade was attacked by regime gunmen. One person was shot and Machado was detained. After an international outcry, she was later released.
In an interview with the Journal shortly after, Machado said her life had changed completely since going into hiding. “What I can say is this is totally different for me because in recent years I’ve been running around all Venezuela, surrounded by thousands of people,” she said. Her only links to the outside world now are the videoconference calls she holds from hiding, including with her three grown-up children, who live abroad.
Former and current Western diplomats say the Venezuelan government knows where she has been hiding, but has refrained from arresting her as they have done with countless other opposition leaders and human-rights activists in the country, seeing her detention as a red line that might spark an international backlash.
She has remained defiant—and, she says, spiritual. In the interview with the Journal, she recalled her late father, the industrialist Henrique Machado, had led Venezuela’s largest metals company before it was expropriated and driven to ruins.
“I pray every day,” she said. “And I communicate with my father, to whom I’m very close. He’s no longer with us, but I have him close to me.”
She said she has never given up hope for change.
“I think in the end, [Maduro’s] regime suffers from profound internal divisions and weaknesses,” Machado said. “They don’t have any way to persuade, to convince people, they don’t have social control. The only thing they have is the use of terror.”
Write to Gareth Vipers at gareth.vipers@wsj.com, Juan Forero at juan.forero@wsj.com and Kejal Vyas at kejal.vyas@wsj.com
