Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for “her fight to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy”.
The announcement of Machado as the winner of the prestigious prize came as a surprise after intense speculation that President Trump could be a wildcard winner after negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza this week.
But the Norwegian Nobel Committee said on Friday that Machado’s tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela was “one of the most extraordinary examples of civil courage in Latin America in recent times”.
Machado, who was barred from running for president and lives in hiding, “keeps the flame of democracy alight amid growing darkness” in President Nicolás Maduro’s “brutal and authoritarian” Venezuela, the committee said. “My God, I have no words” In a video of Machado receiving the news, posted on the Nobel Prize website and social media, she expresses shock at winning.
“My God, I have no words,” she says.
“I am just one person. I certainly don’t deserve this,” she continues, adding that it is the “achievement of an entire society”.
At 58 years old, she has been one of the fiercest critics of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), in power under Maduro, who came to power in the late 1990s under former President Hugo Chávez. Maduro succeeded Chávez in 2013.
An industrial engineer by profession and former legislator in Venezuela’s National Assembly, Machado was shot at and targeted by federal prosecutors. Last year, she was supposed to be the opposition’s presidential candidate in the July elections, but was barred from running.
Instead, she backed a different party led by Edmundo González Urrutia. The pro-Maduro National Electoral Council claimed that President Maduro had won a third term with 51% of the votes, but the opposition said the vote was fraudulent and evidence showed that González had won by a large margin.
Election observers noted numerous irregularities in the ballot boxes, which were widely rejected by the international community as neither free nor fair.
Thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets in protest but were repressed by the government, and Machado went into hiding in August 2024 after threats to her life. However, she did not flee the country and remains in Venezuela, where she promised to continue fighting.
“I trust the Venezuelan people, and I have no doubt that the result of our struggle will be the liberation of Venezuela. Maduro is totally isolated, weaker than ever. And our people want and need to know that I am here with them,” Machado told NPR’s All Things Considered last year.
Source: npr.org by Kate Bartlett