Opponent of Maduro regime receives award and praise for keeping ‘flame of democracy burning’
The Venezuelan opposition politician María Corina Machado has won the Nobel peace prize for her dogged struggle to rescue the South American country from its fate as “a brutal, authoritarian state”.
Machado, 58, a conservative often described as Venezuela’s Iron Lady, has spent the last year living in hiding after her political movement was widely believed to have beaten the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in the July 2024 presidential election.
Maduro refused to accept he had lost to Machado’s ally the former diplomat Edmundo González and launched a ferocious political crackdown that forced González into exile and Machado to go underground.
In one of her last public appearances in Caracas, Machado said she was convinced Maduro’s days in power were numbered after his apparently stinging defeat. “I would say his departure is irreversible,” she told the Guardian.
