Venezuela’s María Corina Machado an inspired choice for Nobel Peace Prize

In 2003, when I was the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, I met with two representatives of an organization called Súmate (“Join Up”), who were collecting signatures for a recall referendum on former President Hugo Chávez. The conversation was about the technicalities of petition sheets and signatures.

I would never have guessed that one of those two, María Corina Machado, would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025.

Machado is the bravest, fiercest person I have ever met.

She would never give up. Chavista thugs beat her up on the floor of the National Assembly in 2013. Almost 8 million Venezuelans, one-quarter of the population, have fled the country. She did not.

In 2023, María Corina won the unified opposition primary to be their candidate against current President Nicolás Maduro in the 2024 presidential elections.

In March 2024, Maduro’s obedient electoral authority “disqualified” her as a candidate based on invented technicalities. It was too late to organize another primary.Machado selected Edmundo González, a retired Venezuelan diplomat with an apolitical record and zero charisma, to run in her place.

Although González was the nominal candidate, it was clear Machado would lead the campaign and, if victorious, would govern through González.

Machado campaigned across Venezuela from the back of a pickup truck in public squares.

Equally important was her pivotal contribution to shoring up Venezuela’s fractured democracy. Machado and her team recruited and trained 600,000 volunteers so they would have a poll watcher at every voting machine.

Poll watchers were trained to retrieve the carbon copy of the official voting tally from every polling place in the country. They developed an app to send the data to a central database to be tabulated independently of the electoral commission and accessed by the public.

When the polls closed, the electoral commission began the count. But with Maduro falling behind, the results website stopped refreshing. A couple of hours later the electoral commission issued the “final result” and claimed victory for Maduro, but they never issued the precinct-by-precinct results required by Venezuelan law. They presented a total without showing their work.

That’s where Machado’s preparation came into play. Her team had verified results from more than 80% of the precincts. They showed Edmundo González defeating Maduro by 67% to 30%. A landslide. Maduro and his gang had stolen the election and didn’t even bother to hide the steal.

The Carter Center, the United Nations and the Organization of American States questioned the legitimacy of the official results. The Carter Center was succinct in its assessment: “Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic.”

I last spoke to Machado in February 2025 when Georgia Tech President Angel Cabrera awarded her the university’s Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Social Courage. Of course, Machado was in an unknown location in Venezuela speaking via Zoom.

On Oct. 10, the Nobel Committee awarded her the 2025 Peace Prize: “She has brought her country’s opposition together. She has never wavered in resisting the militarization of Venezuelan society. She has been steadfast in her support for a peaceful transition to democracy.”