María Corina Machado, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is a Venezuelan opposition leader who built one of the country’s most important political movements and is currently in hiding from President Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian government.
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Machado, 58, is an industrial engineer with a master’s degree in finance who began her political career as a founder of Súmate, a vote-monitoring organisation.
She is the National Coordinator of the political party Vente Venezuela and ran in the 2012 opposition presidential primary, which she lost to Henrique Capriles. During the 2014 Venezuelan protests, she played a leading role in organising demonstrations against Maduro’s government.
She has been in hiding since the candidate she backed lost the 2024 election to President Nicolás Maduro, a vote that was widely seen as rigged.
Machado was born in Caracas, Venezuela, on October 7, 1967. She is a descendant of the 3rd Marquis of Toro, Sebastián José Antonio Rodríguez del Toro y Ascanio, and is the eldest of four daughters of psychologist Corina Parisca and steel businessman Henrique Machado Zuloaga, who was a nephew of Armando Zuloaga, killed in an uprising against Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gómez. She is the great-great-granddaughter of Eduardo Blanco, great-great-niece of Martín Tovar y Tovar, and great-grandniece of Ricardo Zuloaga.
The eldest daughter of a prominent steelmaking family, Machado attended an elite Catholic girls’ school in Caracas and a boarding school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She studied engineering and finance and later worked for the family company, Sivensa.
In 1992, she created the Atenea Foundation, which provides aid to children living in poverty in Caracas. A decade later, she became a political activist and was a founder of Súmate, a voter rights group that led a failed effort to recall Hugo Chávez, the founder of the country’s modern socialist movement and Maduro’s predecessor.
Machado joined the National Assembly in 2010 after winning a record number of votes. She leads the Vente Venezuela opposition party and, in 2023, announced a bid to become president in the 2024 election.
Machado was blocked from running over what the government said were financial irregularities when she was a national legislator. She backed another candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia.
The opposition, however, claimed it had won and collected evidence that it said showed González won by a wide margin.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Machado the prize “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy,” according to a statement.
The committee said it chose Machado primarily for her efforts to advance democracy “in the face of ever-expanding authoritarianism in Venezuela.”
Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, told reporters after the announcement that the judges weighed the security implications of giving the prize to Machado. “This is the discussion we have every year for all candidates, particularly when the person who receives the prize is, in fact, in hiding because of serious threats to her life,” he said, adding that the committee believed the award would support her cause.
Frydnes said he hoped Machado would be able to attend the Nobel Prize ceremony in December, but that it would depend on the security situation.
Machado was named one of BBC‘s 100 Women in 2018 and listed among Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2025. In 2024, Machado received the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize and, with Edmundo González, the Sakharov Prize for representing Venezuelans fighting for democracy.
Machado is considered Venezuela’s “iron lady” — a nickname reminiscent of Britain’s late former Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. She has been lauded by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who, as a senator, co-signed a letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee endorsing Machado for the 2024 Peace Prize.
Following the announcement of her win on Friday, she later praised President Trump, posting in English on social media: “I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause!”
Meanwhile, White House communications director Steven Cheung had said the Nobel committee had “proved they place politics over peace.”
At an Oval Office news conference on Friday evening, Donald Trump said: “The person who actually got the Nobel Prize actually called today, called me and said ‘I’m accepting this in honour of you because you really deserved it.’ A very nice thing to do. I didn’t say ‘Then give it to me’ though. I think she might have. She was very nice. I’ve been helping her along the way.”
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