María Corina Machado dedicated the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to every Venezuelan who has fought for freedom.
María Corina Machado wins the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
The opposition leader María Corina Machado accepted this Friday, with “deep gratitude”, the Nobel Peace Prize 2025 “on behalf of the people of Venezuela, who – he said – have fought for their freedom with admirable courage, dignity, intelligence and love.”
“To every Venezuelan: this award is yours. It is a recognition of what we have achieved together and a reminder of what is still missing. Now we move forward with even more strength, confidence and unwavering faith, because we are going hand in hand with God until the end,” said the former deputy in a statement.
Machado warned that Venezuelans have “suffered 26 years of violence and humiliation at the hands of a tyranny obsessed with subduing citizens and breaking the soul of the nation.
In that sense, he wrote that “the machinery of oppression has been brutal and systematic“, characterized by arrests, torture, forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions that – he stated – constitute crimes against humanity and state terrorism.”
However, he continued, the people’s response “has been firm and unyielding.”
“We have forged a formidable civic movement, overcoming the barriers that the regime built to divide us, and we have united the nation in a powerful desire: peace in freedom. This long journey has entailed indescribable costs: thousands of lives given up and millions forced to leave their land. Today we are very close to achieving our goal,” he stated.
This award, according to the opponent, is “a unique impulse that injects energy and confidence into Venezuelansinside and outside the country, to complete” his task which, as he already said this Friday, is to “conquer freedom” in the South American nation.
“This immense support demonstrates that the world democratic community understands and shares our struggle. It is a firm call for the transition to democracy in Venezuela to take place immediately, as we strongly demanded in the electoral victory of July 28 (2024),” he indicated, in reference to the claimed victory of the opponent Edmundo González Urrutia in the presidential elections held that day, in which Nicolás Maduro was proclaimed the winner by the electoral bodycontrolled by officials related to the chavismo.
Machado assured that his compatriots recognize that the support of “genuine allies has been decisive,” for which he expressed his “deep gratitude” to “the peoples of the Americas and the world and to their brave leaders” who, he assured, support them.
“The history of Venezuela will write their names indelibly. Our people understood that there can be no peace without freedom, and that conquering and defending it requires enormous moral, spiritual and physical strength. “Venezuela will be free, and this achievement will spread courage and hope throughout the Americas, because freedom, democracy and prosperity are the pillars that unite us,” he added.
He Norwegian Nobel Committee, based in Oslo, announced this Friday that Machado is the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize “for her tireless work in promoting democratic rights of the Venezuelan people and for their fight to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
The opponent remains in hiding since her last public appearance, on January 9, when she led a protest in Caracas to defend the claimed victory of González Urrutia, on the eve of Maduro’s inauguration for a third consecutive term.
