The Venezuelan opposition leader and new Nobel Peace Prize winner, María Corina Machado, is the symbol of resistance against Chavismo and one of the most critical voices against the Venezuelan government.
But in addition to being one of the most radical and critical voices against the Administration of President Nicolás Maduro, he is also a supporter of some opposition parties that he considers have succumbed to the regime. His party, Vente Venezuela, is not part of, for example, the Unitary Platform coalition, which has participated in dialogues with Chavismo.
(More: Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado wins the Nobel Peace Prize).
With an anti-communist discourse, which has allowed him to attract many followers in the Venezuelan diaspora, he defends what he calls"popular capitalism," which advocates, among other things, respect for private property, the reduction of the bureaucratic apparatus, and non-state intervention in the economy.
In 2024, he won the Council of Europe's Václav Havel Prize for"denouncing human rights abuses in his country and defending democracy." This award was collected on his behalf by his daughter Ana Corina Sosa, as she is in hiding after reporting electoral fraud in the presidential elections of July 28, 2024. That same year, the democratic opposition of Venezuela, represented by Edmundo González Urrutia y Machado, won the
Sakharov Prize
for freedom of conscience, awarded each year by the European Parliament for an exceptional contribution in the field of human rights. (We recommend: Venezuela requests an urgent meeting with the UN due to the US military deployment).
He was born in Caracas on October 7, 1967. His
father, Henrique Machado
, was an important businessman in the sector metallurgist, and the family businesses were expropriated by the Chavista administration. An industrial engineer from the
Andrés Bello Catholic University
and a graduate in Finance from the Institute of Higher Studies in Administration, she was a professor at the School of Industrial Engineering at said university.
BREAKING NEWS
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 10, 2025
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the 2025 #NobelPeacePrize to Maria Corina Machado 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… pic.twitter.com/Zgth8KNJk9
Machado has played a prominent role in Venezuelan civil society organizations. She co-founded, with her mother, the Atenea Foundation, which works to reintegrate children at risk of social exclusion in Venezuela. and Oportuninas, an organization she directed from 1998 to 2002 that supports assistance programs for children from extremely poor households. In 2002, she co-founded the organization Súmate, dedicated to defending citizens' political rights. As an opponent of Hugo Chávez, in 2005 she met at the White House with then-President George W. Bush, which earned her strong criticism from the Venezuelan government, which accused her of being in the service of the CIA. In February 2010, she resigned as president of Súmate to run in the September elections of that year, in which she was elected as a deputy to the National Assembly. (Parliament) for the state of Miranda. She was the representative who received the highest number of votes.
In 2011, she ran as a candidate in the primaries of the opposition platform to the Chávez government, the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), a vote she lost to Henrique Capriles in 2012. That same year, she founded the Vente Venezuela party, a group that defines itself as centrist-liberal. From her seat, Machado stood out as a staunch opponent of President Chávez and made famous the phrase"expropriating is stealing," which she used to interrupt a speech by Chávez in 2012. (You can read: Latin America registers more than 170,000 deportations, according to a humanitarian organization.) In February 2014, she led, along with Leopoldo López and Antonio Ledezma, a campaign called 'The Exit', based on the call for demonstrations to overthrow Maduro, who had only been in charge of the government for a few months after the death of Chávez.
In March 2014, she was removed from her position as a deputy when the
speaker of the Chamber at the time, Diosdado Cabello, accused her of violating the Constitution by agreeing to be Panama's alternate representative to the Organization of American States (OAS).
EFE
Also in 2014, she was charged with public incitement for the violent events that occurred during the anti-government protests in February, and was banned from leaving the country. She was also accused of conspiracy for an alleged plan to assassinate President Nicolás Maduro. In 2015, the Venezuelan Comptroller General's Office decided to disqualify her from holding any public office for one year for not including labor-related concepts in her sworn statement of assets, which is why she could not run for deputy that year. In 2022, she confirmed her participation in the anti-Chavez primary elections, scheduled for October 2023. She registered her candidacy in June 2023, and a week later, the Comptroller General's Office extended the disqualification imposed on her in 2015 to 15 years (until 2030), a decision condemned by her electoral rivals, the OAS, the United States, and the EU.Machado maintained his candidacy and won a landslide victory in the primaries on October 22, with 92.3% of the votes, although the vote was declared"suspended" by the Supreme Court a week later.
EFE
On November 30, 2023, the Venezuelan government paved the way for the approval of anti-Chavez supporters, and in December, Machado requested a review of his case from the Supreme Court. However, on January 26, 2024, the high court upheld his 15-year ban. Machado then gave way to historian Corina Yoris, but she was unable to register her candidacy due to obstacles from the electoral authorities. The Democratic Unitary Platform, the main anti-Chavez coalition, then chose to provisionally nominate diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia. Urrutia was finally confirmed as the presidential candidate for the July 28 elections on April 19, with the support of Corina Machado.
