María Corina Machado’s long fight to restore freedom to her native Venezuela has taken her from a comfortable upbringing among the elite to waging a grassroots campaign while in hiding to try to unseat the country’s authoritarian president.
Nicknamed the “Iron Lady” by some for her tenacity and refusal to compromise, Machado’s efforts were rewarded on Friday when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The 58-year-old led the opposition election campaign against revolutionary socialist President Nicolás Maduro in July last year. She won over Venezuelans with a message that peaceful change was possible after years of economic chaos and repression, which have forced 8mn people into exile.
After the wildly unpopular Maduro claimed an improbable victory at the polls, the government ordered troops on to the streets to crush protests and sent secret police to arrest activists.
The opposition produced thousands of official tally sheets to prove that Maduro had stolen the election, a claim endorsed by independent monitors, but the government would not budge and Machado was forced into hiding.
Despite the arrest of close colleagues and regime pressure that forced her family out of the country, she has persisted with a campaign to oust Maduro via social media, despite the overwhelming odds against her.
Apart from an appearance at a protest rally against Maduro’s reinauguration in January, after which she was briefly arrested and released, Venezuelans have not seen her in public since the election.
“I couldn’t believe that I would have to live in total isolation for almost 430 days,” Machado told the Financial Times in a video interview last month. “I have tried to live one day at a time.”
Pedro Burelli, a close friend of Machado, said on Friday that “she has spent 11 years without being able to leave her country, without being able to hug her children freely or to celebrate her achievements, like so many millions of other Venezuelans dispersed around the world. And she has never complained.”
A free-market conservative long considered too radical to lead the opposition, Machado trounced her rivals in a primary election in 2023, winning 93 per cent of the vote and unifying a fractious anti-Maduro coalition.
When the regime banned her from standing, alleging fraud and tax violations, she endorsed a surrogate, 74-year-old retired diplomat Edmundo González.
After the government prevented her from taking flights, she criss-crossed the country by car to campaign for González, using jerry cans to refuel when authorities shut petrol stations on her routes.
González was forced into exile in Spain after the election, but Machado — conscious that opposition figures risked losing support if they left the country — chose to remain and fight on alone, sustained by her political convictions and strong Catholic faith.
News of the Nobel award came as a complete surprise, friends said. A video posted by González after the announcement shows her taking a phone call from him and saying: “I am in shock, I can’t believe this.”
The daughter of a wealthy steel magnate, Machado trained as an industrial engineer, speaks fluent English and had a brief career in business before entering politics in opposition to Hugo Chávez, the socialist revolutionary and former military officer who governed Venezuela from 1999 until his death from cancer in 2013.
Chávez once dismissed her as “a little bourgeoise in the fine style”, while Maduro claimed last year that she was a “criminal” who had left the country to seek funding from drug traffickers in neighbouring Colombia.
She remade herself during last year’s campaign, dressing down and adopting a plain-speaking, down-to-earth style that electrified an opposition long despondent about its chances of victory.
Only a handful of non-regime politicians in Venezuela have remained outside her camp, figures popularly known as alacranes, or scorpions, because of their attempts to cut backroom deals with Maduro.
A thorn in the side of the Biden administration as it attempted to negotiate a deal with Maduro, she backed the severe economic sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the first Trump administration.
An advocate of free markets, privatisation and individual liberty, Machado founded the Vente Venezuela party in 2012 to advance her ideas. She has denounced Chevron, the US oil company granted a licence to operate in Venezuela, for propping up the Maduro regime by providing it with a source of revenue.
Now that Donald Trump has ordered the biggest US naval deployment in decades to the southern Caribbean, and shut down negotiating channels, Machado believes time is running out for the repressive Venezuelan government. She has thanked the US president for his support.
The US pressure has “created the conditions for Maduro and his regime to increasingly understand that their time is up and that their best option is to leave power now”, she told the FT last month.
Machado was asked after her closing election campaign rally in the oil city of Maracaibo last year if she believed that Maduro was particularly afraid of women.
“I don’t know, but he ought to be,” the opposition leader replied. “They underestimated me . . . they thought: ‘She’s a liberal, her family has money, she’s a woman, she won’t get anywhere.’ But we Venezuelan women are fierce.”
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