The woman who wouldn't leave: How Machado became Venezuela's voice of resistance

In a country where dissent often leads to exile or prison, María Corina Machado represents something rare: Endurance.

From the rise of Hugo Chávez to the authoritarian grip of Nicolás Maduro, Machado, 58, has been banned, attacked, defamed —and yet never silenced. On Friday her odyssey was recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize, honoring her decades-long struggle for democracy in Venezuela.

The Nobel Committee cited her “tireless work promoting the democratic rights of the Venezuelan people and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”

For Machado — a former engineer turned political firebrand — it was not just personal validation, but, as she put it, an “immense recognition of the struggle of all Venezuelans, a renewed boost to complete our task: achieving freedom.”

Feared by the regime, revered by her supporters and respected abroad for her moral clarity, Machado has become the defining symbol of Venezuela’s fight to end an oppressive regime.

A Heritage of defiance

Born in Caracas in 1967, Machado came from Venezuela’s professional elite. Her father, Henrique Machado Zuloaga, was a steel industry magnate, her mother, Corina Parisca, a psychologist. She traces her lineage to the third Marquis of Toro and the 19th-century writer Eduardo Blanco. But if her background was privileged, her path diverged sharply toward confrontation, not comfort.

An industrial engineering graduate from Andrés Bello Catholic University, Machado also holds a master’s in finance from the IESA business school in Caracas and completed Yale University’s World Fellows Program in 2009. In the early 1990s, as a young mother of three, she founded Fundación Atenea to help orphaned and at-risk children. The poverty she witnessed shaped her future political convictions.

“Something clicked,” she once said of her motivation to confront the regime. “I had this unsettling feeling that I could not stay at home and watch the country get polarized and collapse.”

Ballots over bullets

Her political awakening came in 2002 amid Chávez’s radical Bolivarian revolution. With fellow engineer Alejandro Plaz, she co-founded Súmate, a civic group dedicated to protecting electoral integrity.

Their movement reached a peak in 2004, organizing a recall referendum against Chávez. The vote was peaceful and legal—but after Chávez narrowly survived, the regime struck back. Machado and Plaz were charged with treason for receiving support from the U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy.

In 2005, her visit to the White House and meeting with President George W. Bush made her a lightning rod. Caracas branded her a traitor. But inside Venezuela, she was slowly becoming something else: the face of democratic resistance.

In 2010, Machado entered formal politics. Running under the opposition coalition MUD, she won a seat in the National Assembly with the highest vote count in the country. Campaigning in neighborhoods once loyal to Chávez, she called for an end to fear, corruption and repression.

In 2012, during Chávez’s annual address to parliament, she famously confronted him on live TV: “Expropriating and not paying is stealing.” Visibly irritated, Chávez dismissed her as a “little bourgeois”—but the moment electrified the nation.

That courage came at a steep cost. In 2011, she was physically attacked by government loyalists. In 2013 and 2014, she survived more assaults, smear campaigns, and surveillance.

During the 2014 anti-Maduro protests, Machado became a leading voice, denouncing state violence before the Organization of American States. In retaliation, the regime illegally stripped her of her legislative seat. She was soon charged with treason based on forged emails later exposed as fabrications by SEBIN, the Venezuelan intelligence service.

“In a dictatorship,” she warned, “the weaker the regime, the greater the repression.”

Unbroken and unbending

Unlike many of her peers, Machado never fled Venezuela. “My place is here, beside my people,” she insisted.

In 2023, she announced her candidacy in the opposition’s presidential primary, campaigning under the slogan Hasta el final —All the way. She drew massive crowds across the country, energizing a fractured opposition.

In June, the Maduro-controlled Comptroller General’s office disqualified her from holding public office for 15 years—a move condemned by the United Nations, the European Union and dozens of democratic governments. But Machado improvised. After winning the primary, she named a respected academic, Corina Yoris, as a stand-in candidate. When Yoris was banned as well, diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia stepped in.

Each time the regime removed a piece from the board, Machado replaced it. By mid-2024, González was leading Maduro in every major poll—largely thanks to Machado’s ground game and unshaken credibility.

After the vote, into hiding

The July 2024 election descended into chaos. Opposition witnesses were expelled from polling stations. Soldiers seized voting materials. Maduro declared victory.

Then Machado disappeared.

Weeks later, she resurfaced in a letter in The Wall Street Journal: “I am in hiding,” she wrote, “fearing for my life, my freedom, and that of my fellow countrymen.” She accused the regime of electoral fraud and praised volunteers who “protected the voter receipts with their lives.”

Her words reignited outrage across Latin America and Europe. In January 2025, she briefly appeared at a rally in the Caracas subdivison of Chacao. Gunfire erupted as government forces attacked her convoy. Machado escaped—but the message was clear.

By then, the world had taken notice. In 2024, she received the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize and shared the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize with González. She was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and featured on the BBC’s 100 Women list.

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize was the highest recognition yet—an acknowledgment that her nonviolent resistance had become a symbol of global democratic resilience.

“Maria Corina Machado has shown that the tools of democracy are also the tools of peace. She embodies the hope of a different future, one where the fundamental rights of citizens are protected, and their voices are heard. In this future, people will finally be free to live in peace,” the Nobel Committee wrote.

Vision beyond resistance

Though often called Venezuela’s Iron Lady, Machado’s platform is forward-looking. She champions “popular capitalism,” advocating for the privatization of state enterprises, including the state-owned oil giant PDVSA, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and the regulation of medical cannabis.

Machado has lived through the arc of Venezuela’s decline: from oil boom to economic ruin, from democracy to dictatorship. Her father died in 2023; her children live in exile after receiving death threats.

Still, she remains undeterred.

“We are not victims,” she told a rally in 2023. “We are citizens reclaiming what belongs to us: our freedom.”

The Nobel Prize won’t stop the persecution, nor will it alone restore Venezuela’s democracy. But it places Machado’s name among those who have faced tyranny with unwavering courage: Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Malala Yousafzai.

And for millions of Venezuelans, it sends a message the world had long delayed: they are not forgotten.

Machado supports international sanctions against her country’s regime, but emphasizes negotiation and reconciliation. Her critics call her uncompromising; her supporters see moral consistency.

“She stayed when others left,” a close ally once noted. “That, in Venezuela, is no small thing.”