This month, the Nobel Peace Prize committee in Norway awarded their famous award to a Venezuelan citizen for the first time: someone I know and whom we should all deeply respect, a freedom fighter with a deep belief in Christ—María Corina Machado. Machado was an early warner of the dangers of socialism and went from an obscure and often unfairly ignored activist to congresswoman to the most popular and famous opposition leader to the socialist regime in Caracas. Machado is now in hiding and unable to receive the Nobel Prize in person, but her fight to liberate Venezuela from the claws of Maduro’s regime is that country’s best hope for a free and prosperous future. Her Nobel is a recognition of the value of never surrendering the struggle for freedom.
María Corina began her political career in the early 2000s, when Hugo Chavez, the elected socialist turned socialist tyrant, began his rule and ruin of Venezuela. She founded an election-observer-and-integrity organization called Sumate. From that platform she warned early in the Chavez presidency about widespread election fraud, something that eventually took her to the White House to meet with then U.S. President George W. Bush.
María Corina was elected to the Venezuelan Congress in 2010 as the most voted-for representative in the country, in fact in my own district of eastern Caracas. Hugo Chavez, every day more authoritarian than the one before, had a habit of giving long speeches both on TV, where he forced all households to watch his morning TV show, Hello, Mr. President, and at public events. Machado finally had it during Hugo Chavez’s hours-long state of the union address to Congress in 2012. She stood up in the chamber and defied him, calling him a thief and a crook to his face for his expropriation of Venezuelans’ private property and for causing mass shortages and inflation in the country. Chavez responded in his usual clever and insulting manner, using the popular phrase “The eagle doesn’t catch flies” and stating that she should run for president if she wants to debate him.
And she did. Machado ran for president in 2012 on a platform of “popular capitalism,” alluding to Margaret Thatcher, but she lost in the opposition primaries. The man who won those primaries, Henrique Capriles, turned out years later to have been a Nicolás Maduro regime plant who now supports and works with Maduro and who had tricked the Venezuelan people into thinking he opposed him. This is not dissimilar from when Hugo Chavez paid off his own 2000 election opponent, Francisco Arias Cardenas, and Cardenas became a Socialist Party member and governor of a major state as reward. Capriles lost two rigged elections, one against Chavez in October 2012 and another after Chavez died against his handpicked successor, Maduro, in April 2013.
But María Corina did not stop. In 2014 she was stripped of her congressional seat by the Maduro regime and became a key figure organizing the mass 2014 protests and 2015 congressional campaign against Maduro. She was beaten, literally, but never gave up, even when the rest of the opposition parties and leaders continued to ignore and demean María Corina as a right-wing free market radical. They argued that Venezuela needed a form of social democracy and that the Venezuelan people were not ready for capitalism. But year after year, each of those opposition elites turned out to be socialist regime plants that betrayed their followers. But the economic catastrophe brought about by socialism became more evident every day, changing the minds of more and more Venezuelans.
In 2018, Maduro won another fraudulent election, this time barring his opposition from running at all, permitting only a host of handpicked, fake opposition candidates. The opposition-controlled but powerless Congress declared the office of the presidency to be vacant for the next term, and an unknown man named Juan Guaido became speaker of Congress and thus the “constitutional” president.
Guaido had a unique opportunity but squandered it. President Donald Trump was now in the White House, and he implemented the toughest sanctions against the Maduro regime yet. And Trump-allied conservative presidents led Venezuela’s neighbors of Brazil and Colombia: Jair Bolsonaro and Ivan Duque, respectively. Guaido’s ceremonial swearing in as president gave him the chance to organize an international coalition to liberate Venezuela by force, but he and his staffers and allies rejected any such intervention. Even after U.S. Attorney General William Barr indicted Maduro and his narco-cartel in Venezuela, Guaido and his team did not pursue the law enforcement route against the regime. Then Biden became president in January of 2021, and both Colombia and Brazil elected socialist allies of Maduro: Gustavo Petro and Lula da Silva. The time for freedom had passed.
Venezuelans lost all hope after 2019 because of the international government changes and an economy that worsened to its lowest point in history amid the COVID-19 pandemic and deteriorated infrastructure. More than two decades of state ownership of the electricity and water sectors with free services resulted in increasing blackouts and water shortages, including a nationwide days-long blackout. But the global sanctions against the Maduro regime forced an unexpected outcome: The regime elite had stolen wealth but there was nowhere to spend it, so they lifted price and currency controls, ending the shortages and allowing for dollarization to tame inflation. The Venezuelan people were poorer than ever, with the average person living with barely $100 per month, but the regime elites could now live the grand life in Venezuela alongside them. The economy stabilized.
Despite the hopeless situation for the average person, María Corina never gave up, organizing an effort to prove without a doubt that the elections were rigged, again, in 2024. The people themselves bravely organized the opposition primaries, and Marina Corina won with over 90% of the vote, becoming the candidate against Maduro. Maduro feared she was both too popular and not open to corruption like her predecessors—so he barred her from running. Machado then supported someone who had been able to sign up as a substitute candidate, an unknown diplomat named Edmundo Gonzalez. The Venezuelan people bravely supported him because of Machado’s endorsement and despite the punishment and government repression for voting against the tyrant.
When election day came, Machado’s team had organized over a million election observers and volunteers in a country of some 20 million people, and they collected the certificates of results in over 80% of election machines in every precinct and table, proving that Machado’s endorsed candidate won with over two thirds of the vote against Maduro’s 30%. Maduro’s votes included government employees and welfare recipients who were forced by the military and their bosses to vote for Maduro and prove it to them to keep their jobs and benefits. And the regime also excluded the nine million Venezuelans who fled abroad from registering to vote. The real support for María Corina and her movement among the people was clearly an overwhelming majority of the country.
Proving that the election was stolen and mass protests in favor of Gonzalez’s victory unnerved Maduro, so he began the most brutal repression campaign in Latin American history. He kidnapped over 2,000 election volunteers and witnesses and put them in prisons he refurbished to become “re-education” centers, forcing them to do socialist salutes and torturing them into submission or death. Among these political prisoners is a friend of mine, María Oropeza, who had become Vente Venezuela’s leader in her home state of Portuguesa, the free-market political party that Machado founded and leads. Oropeza, now 31 years old, was kidnapped at night from her home by masked agents and sent to the largest torture center in Latin America, El Helicoide. Maduro’s thugs are torturing hundreds and forcing thousands more into exile through the Venezuela-Colombia border.
Now María Corina is in hiding inside Venezuela, but Maduro is in great trouble, too, because President Trump is back in the White House and he’s not playing around. Trump reinstated the sanctions that Biden lifted and is now taking direct military action against the regime through kinetic strikes against drug boats coming from Venezuela into the Caribbean and the United States. This serves a dual purpose for America: It reduces the flow of drugs and thus death and despair, and it raises the cost of doing business for the Maduro regime cartel, called the Cartel of the Suns. Fewer Venezuelans will now be willing to traffic drugs when the price may be death, and thus, as the laws of supply and demand dictate, the supply will fall, as will Maduro’s profits.
But President Trump is not stopping there. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has directed the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) to amass a record number of U.S. troops near Venezuela There is now a 10,000-strong force in Puerto Rico and in the Caribbean near Venezuela. The president, the secretary of war, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have all made clear that the potential next step is land strikes against the Cartel of the Suns. In fact, President Trump recently authorized “lethal” operations by the CIA inside Venezuela against Maduro and his cronies. At the same time, Attorney General Pam Bondi raised the reward for Maduro’s capture to a historic record of $50 million and raised the reward for other regime members, like Diosdado Cabello, too. FBI Director Kash Patel recently went after two Maduro regime money launderers in the U.S. and is prioritizing the dismantling of these illicit financing networks here and in Venezuela.
All these actions and announcements by the U.S. government point in one direction: The U.S government is getting ready to bring Maduro to justice and to end his reign of narco-socialist terror in Venezuela, which would allow Machado to take over and restore democracy and freedom in the country.
This is why her winning the Nobel Peace Prize and her reaction are both so important. When was the last time a freedom fighter, one that supported free enterprise and risked her life against a socialist regime, won a Nobel? And what did Machado do when she won? She was grateful for the fact that none of this would have been possible without the support of President Donald Trump. She was right to dedicate the award to Trump in addition to the Venezuelan people. But what matters is not the Nobel. It is Venezuela’s freedom.
If the Trump administration goes through with its strategy to depose Maduro, something that will only happen by external military force, then the president will be hailed as a hero in Venezuela, and the country will be turned from a “hub of narco-trafficking into an energy hub,” as María Corina likes to say, as Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves. A free and prosperous Venezuela wouldn’t just lower global energy prices; it would also stop the largest refugee crisis in the world and prevent Tren de Aragua gang members from reaching the United States, in addition to stopping large sums of cocaine from reaching the U.S. and destabilizing Latin America. In the end, if Venezuela becomes a free country again, María Corina will be able to say that a “fly” finally did stop an “eagle.”
