Maria Corina Machado, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, is a 58-year-old Venezuelan opposition activist and industrial engineer who lives in hiding.
In 1992, she founded the Atenea Foundation to benefit street children in Caracas. Ten years later, she co-founded Sumate, an organization that promotes free and fair elections and conducts training and election monitoring.
In 2010, Machado won a record number of votes and was elected to the National Assembly. The regime expelled her from office in 2014.
She leads the Vente Venezuela opposition party and, in 2017, helped found the Soy Venezuela alliance, uniting pro-democracy forces across political divides in the country.
In 2023, Machado announced her candidacy for president in the 2024 presidential election. However, in 2024, Venezuela’s courts blocked her from running for president and challenging President Nicolas Maduro, who has been in power since 2013.
Crackdown on opposition in Venezuela
Edmundo Gonzalez, who had never run for office before, took her place. Widespread repression, including disqualifications, arrests, and human rights violations, preceded the election.
The crackdown on dissent only increased after the National Electoral Council, stacked with Maduro loyalists, declared Maduro the winner despite credible evidence to the contrary.
The election results announced by the council sparked mass protests across the country, to which the government responded with force, resulting in more than 20 deaths.
Machado went into hiding and has not been seen in public since January. A Venezuelan court issued an arrest warrant for Gonzalez, who moved to Spain and was granted asylum.
Last year, Machado and Gonzalez received the Sakharov Prize, the European Union’s highest human rights honor.
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