Machado
María Corina Machado is a Venezuelan engineer, businesswoman, and politician who founded and leads Vente Venezuela, a classical liberal opposition party established in 2013 to advocate for democratic reforms amid the country's authoritarian decline under the Chávez-Maduro regimes.[1][2]She rose to prominence as a vocal critic of government corruption and electoral fraud, notably organizing the opposition's 2023 primaries where she secured an overwhelming victory despite a judicial ban prohibiting her candidacy, which she attributed to regime retaliation for her advocacy of transparency and human rights.[3][4]
Machado orchestrated the opposition's strategy in the 2024 presidential election, endorsing Edmundo González Urrutia as her proxy candidate, whose campaign achieved a documented landslide based on independent tallies of voting records, though the regime's National Electoral Council suppressed results and declared incumbent Nicolás Maduro the winner without verifiable evidence.[3][2]
Her non-violent leadership in mobilizing civil society against institutional decay earned her the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, recognizing her role in sustaining democratic resistance despite personal risks including assassination attempts, arbitrary detention threats, and exile-like restrictions imposed by security forces.[4][2]
Earlier, she co-founded the NGO Súmate in 2002 to monitor elections and signed the Carmona Decree during a short-lived military uprising against Hugo Chávez, actions that drew regime accusations of coup involvement but which she defended as responses to executive overreach and constitutional violations.[2]