It was a dramatic homecoming. On Sunday, Venezuela’s most popular politician, María Corina Machado, who had been in exile for nearly a year, slipped across the border and announced she was back in the country.
Machado wants elections in Venezuela. The United States says it does too, but has not pushed publicly for a date. Today I write about why Machado’s return could lead to a moment of truth — for Venezuela, and for the Trump administration.
A dramatic homecoming — but what comes next?
For María Corina Machado, leaving Venezuela was always going to be a gamble.
Under threat from a regime fearful of her popularity, she had spent nearly a year in hiding, changing locations 14 times.
She finally did leave, by boat one night in 2025, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway. Her attempts to return afterward were repeatedly foiled. The Trump administration, after capturing President Nicolás Maduro, preferred to work with his former deputy.
Then, on Sunday, after nearly a year in exile, Machado surfaced inside Venezuela. At 11:31 a.m. local time, Machado wrote on X: “I am here. With you all.”
Thousands of her followers lined up to cheer her motorcade as it made its way to the capital, Caracas. Some of her supporters said they cried when they heard she was back.
The return of Machado, Venezuela’s most popular politician, now poses a dilemma for the Trump administration. It has promised to work toward elections in Venezuela, while installing as president one of the leading figures in Maduro’s repressive regime. The question: How much does it really care about Venezuelan democracy?
Sidelined by Trump
When the Trump administration toppled Maduro in a surprise overnight raid in early January, Machado might have looked like a ready option to be the country’s next leader.
She had built-in legitimacy with many Venezuelans. A charismatic politician, she rallied millions to vote for her movement in the 2024 presidential election, an election her candidate rightfully won, according to outside observers. Maduro claimed victory anyway.
She’d also gone out of her way to praise Trump, calling him a “champion of freedom,” and even repeating his claims about U.S. election fraud. When she won the Nobel, she dedicated it to him and then later gave him the actual medal.
But in the immediate aftermath of the January raid, it quickly became clear that the Trump administration already had a governing partner in mind, and it wasn’t Machado. It was Maduro’s own vice president, Delcy Rodríguez.
In the months since, Rodríguez has transformed from Trump adversary to pliant partner, and Venezuela has effectively become a modern-day vassal state of the United States, which controls the country’s oil revenues. Trump’s praise for Rodríguez is unstinting. “We have a great situation going over there, with a wonderful president, a wonderful president-elect, Delcy,” he said at a White House event in the spring. “And she is doing a great job.” It was around the same time that Machado visited the White House, and Trump advised her not to return home.
But Machado never gave up. In an interview this month with my colleague Julie Turkewitz, she hinted she’d be back “sooner than you would expect.” We don’t know exactly how she made it in, though we do know that the U.S. did not block her.
The question is whether her return will change anything. In Rodríguez, the U.S. has a leader who does what Washington wants. Would it give that up to support someone it may not control?
Elections by July?
As Julie pointed out, Machado is walking a difficult line. She needs to stay in the good graces of the Trump administration, which calls the shots. She also needs to show her supporters in Venezuela that she is still willing to stand up for them.
Machado told Julie that she would respect any oil deals that have already been agreed to should she come to power.
But she also accused one of the Trump administration’s main business partners, a wealthy man named Alejandro Betancourt, who recently entered into a lucrative deal with the administration to control roughly a fifth of Venezuela’s oil reserves, of “obscene corruption.” Betancourt strongly denies the accusations, and has not been charged with any crimes.
Machado’s track record suggests that she will not back down from her central demand: free and fair elections. And she wants them by July. Were elections held today, she would beat Rodríguez in a landslide, according to a poll this month by Bloomberg News.
Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who runs Venezuela from Washington (my colleagues have described him as a de facto viceroy), insists that U.S. support for democracy in Venezuela is sincere, and that he wants it to happen before the end of the administration. Trump himself has been more ambivalent. This summer, he said the country wasn’t ready for elections yet. And on Sunday he greeted the news of Machado’s return with a shrug.
“I don’t know anything about it, but I think she’s a very nice woman,” he said. “She gave me her Nobel Prize, so how can I say anything else? And I hope she’s safe; she’s a very nice woman. But we’re doing really well in Venezuela.”
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