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A Nobel Peace Prize Brings Hope and Scrutiny to Democratic Struggle

October 16, 2025
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A Nobel Peace Prize Brings Hope and Scrutiny to Democratic Struggle
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Last year, María Corina Machado, the leader of Venezuela’s opposition, was forced in to hiding by the country’s autocrat after he stole a presidential election Ms. Machado’s movement had won.

Now, Ms. Machado is the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, U.S. warships are floating near the Venezuelan coast and the United States is calling President Nicolás Maduro a “narco-terrorist” and a fugitive from American justice.

The Nobel award has galvanized Ms. Machado’s movement. But it has also highlighted the challenges Ms. Machado faces in meeting the expectations of Venezuelans hungry for political change, while also focusing scrutiny on her hard-line tactics.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee noted Ms. Machado’s work to achieve a “peaceful transition’’ to democracy. Yet her efforts to topple Mr. Maduro have included calls for a military insurrection and unconditional support for President Trump’s military strikes against boats in the Caribbean that he says are smuggling drugs.

“You can’t negotiate with a criminal narco-terrorist apparatus from a position of weakness,” Ms. Machado told Fox Noticias this month, referring to Mr. Trump’s military pressure. “The path to peace lies through liberty, and to have liberty you must have strength.”

The extent of Ms. Machado’s mandate to support violent means to achieve democratic ends has set off increasingly virulent online debates inside Venezuela and among the diaspora.

Her supporters say her movement’s sweeping electoral victory last year and the Nobel Peace Prize validate her political strategy.

“If anyone had doubts about the strategy, the award of the Nobel to Mária Corina ratifies that we are on the right path,” Ms. Machado’s representative said in a written response to questions. He declined to be named, citing fear of government retribution.

The merits of the representative’s assertion have been difficult to assess because repression and deep polarization has forced independent Venezuelan pollsters to stop publishing surveys or making public statements.

The New York Times has obtained data from three unpublishedsurveys conducted separately in August or September by three Venezuelan-based polling companies with a track record of independence. These surveys show that Ms. Machado remains the most popular politician in Venezuela.

Two of the polls show that on the balance more Venezuelans support than reject her leadership. She has won widespread admiration for her personal courage and the consistency of her political beliefs, which combine staunch support for personal freedoms with social conservatism and economic liberalism. She has held those positions since becoming a political activist in the early 2000s.

Her aversion to political alliances, tight control over her movement and unequivocal rejection of negotiations with the government have allowed Ms. Machado to avoid corruption scandals and defections that have discredited previous torchbearers of Venezuelan opposition, the pollsters said.

These same attributes, however, have exposed her to criticisms of sectarianism and dogmatism.

“Dialogue, mutual understanding and negotiations are three words that are missing from her vocabulary,” said Vladimir Villegas, a prominent Venezuelan journalist and former senior official, who broke with Mr. Maduro but has been critical of Ms. Machado. “And all conflicts end in negotiations.”

Ms. Machado’s support reached a peak last summer, when she mounted a nationwide grass roots electoral campaign to successfully challenge Mr. Maduro in a presidential vote.

Mr. Maduro effectively ignored the results, declared himself the winner and crushed protests challenging him. Since then, Ms. Machado’s inability to counter the impact of the Maduro authoritarian government has slowly eroded faith in her movement, the polls show.

In September, about 20 percent of Venezuelans said Ms. Machado could achieve political change, down from more than 50 percent at the time of the election, in July 2024, according to one survey. The same poll showed that about 50 percent viewed Ms. Machado positively as a politician, down from about 60 percent in July 2024.

Mr. Maduro’s approval rating in the poll stood at 18 percent last month.

The pollster shared these results with The Times on condition of anonymity, citing fear of government repression. His findings echo the results of a separate survey seen by The Times.

To maintain pressure on the government, Ms. Machado turned for support to the international community. She found her most powerful ally in Mr. Trump, whose administration had designated Mr. Maduro’s government a drug cartel that threatens the security of the United States. American officials have made clear, in private, that the ultimate goal is to push Mr. Maduro from power.

Ms. Machado’s alliance with Mr. Trump has given her a potent political weapon, but also ties her to policies that have divided Venezuelans and have proven unsuccessful in the past.

Ms. Machado has remained largely silent after the Trump administration canceled temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants and began detaining and deporting many of them. She has also supported Mr. Trump’s decision to send 250 Venezuelan migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador without due process, accusing them, with little evidence, of being members of a transnational gang.

She has backed the tightening of economic sanctions against Venezuela, which has reduced the government’s access to hard currency, but has also slashed the purchasing power of most Venezuelans and has caused inflation to soar.

And most recently, Ms. Machado has welcomed the Trump administration’s move to send warships to the Caribbean and kill at least 27 people it said were smuggling drugs off Venezuela’s coast, without providing evidence of crimes. Many experts say the killings amount to extrajudicial killings.

The Trump administration has ratcheted up pressure on Mr. Maduro this week, secretly authorizing the C.I.A. to conduct covert operations in Venezuela, according to U.S. officials. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said the United States was mulling strikes inside the country.

Independent polling shows that most Venezuelans reject armed intervention. A survey from September showed that about 30 percent of respondents supported the use of violence by a foreign military to achieve political change.

Venezuelans who support this course say they see no other option.

“I completely agree with the warships here by the Caribbean coast, because, to tell you the truth, what else is left?,” said José, a 52-year-old Caracas resident in a recent interview. “We have 25 years of this” government, he added. The Times is withholding his and other last names of people interviewed for this article for their security.

The government has exploited the broad fear of violence, presenting themselves as guarantors of stability and peace against what they paint as chaos and anarchy that would follow Ms. Machado’s assumption of power. In private, government officials said they see Ms. Machado’s support for violent measures, such as lethal attacks on suspected drug traffickers, as their best hope of marginalizing her politically.

Ms. Machado’s decision to not focus on the deportations of Venezuelans from the United States has alienated some of their relatives back in Venezuela, including people who have supported her electoral campaign.

A year ago, migration was at the core of Ms. Machado’s winning electoral strategy. Ms. Machado promised voters that her movement would reunite millions of Venezuelan families that were separated by the exodus triggered by Mr. Maduro’s disastrous economic policies. The message galvanized the nation and thrust Ms. Machado from the margins of Venezuelan politics to become the dominant opposition figure.

“I used to get emotional when she spoke about the return of the Venezuelans, of everyone who migrated, everyone who had to leave,” said Josefina, an activist who participated in Ms. Machado’s electoral campaign last year. “Since she has been at Trump’s side this message has been, like, erased. This has annoyed and even hurt me.”

One prominent pollster said his focus groups showed that many inside Venezuela have accepted the Trump administration’s argument that most of the deportees are criminals who do not deserve public sympathy. (The U.S. deported about 15,000 Venezuelans back to Venezuela this year.)

Overall, the hard-line policies supported by Ms. Machado have failed to dislodge authoritarian governments in other periods of Venezuela’s modern history, said Laura Gamboa, an expert on democracy at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana. She added that military interventions have rarely created a sustained democracy in other countries.

“They are relying on a strategy that will likely cause the regime to retrench further,” she said in a telephone interview, referring to Ms. Machado’s movement.

Ms. Machado has previously said that past attempts by other opposition factions to negotiate with Mr. Maduro have also failed. Those talks have only ended up strengthening his government, she said.

Sheyla Urdaneta and Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting.

Anatoly Kurmanaev covers Russia and its transformation following the invasion of Ukraine.

The post A Nobel Peace Prize Brings Hope and Scrutiny to Democratic Struggle appeared first on New York Times.

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