Machado once backed Trump’s Venezuela plan. Now the jilted Nobel laureate is frozen out
In October, María Corina Machado portrayed President Donald Trump as the leader who would help deliver a peaceful, orderly democratic transition centered on Venezuelan opposition figures.
Instead, he is signaling a U.S.-managed transitional arrangement that may even work with Chavista successors to deposed leader Nicolás Maduro and focuses heavily on U.S. control of Venezuelan oil.
Machado’s interview at Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh now reads like both a warning and a missed chance: Nearly everything she said about Maduro’s criminal regime and the need for escalating pressure has been vindicated. But the democratic, Venezuelan‑led transition she imagined has been replaced—at least for now—by Trump’s assertion that the United States will “run” Venezuela and by Washington’s choice of a Maduro loyalist as its preferred partner.
A vision of law‑based pressure and Venezuelan leadership
In October 2025, speaking while in hiding just weeks after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Machado described Maduro’s system not as a normal dictatorship but as “a criminal structure, a narco terrorist structure” that was inflicting “huge harm and bringing huge pain to our people” and “destabilizing the whole Western Hemisphere.” The only way to dismantle it, she argued, was “to cut the inflows that come from criminal activities such as drug trafficking, gold smuggling, arms smuggling, even human trafficking,” and she hailed Trump for finally showing “the vision and the clarity to cut those inflows from coming into that regime.”
Her road map emphasized law and transparency rather than occupation: “we have…asked that the approach should be using law enforcement,” she told Fortune, calling on “all democratic countries around the world…to have a full disclosure of all the information they have regarding all the crimes Nicolás Maduro and his cronies have committed,” so that “the world know the truth and…the Venezuelan people learn the truth.” That disclosure and asset freezing, she said, “will be the last decisive action in order to move ahead into a peaceful, orderly transition to democracy in Venezuela.”
‘Maduro started the war. President Trump is ending the war’
By late 2025, U.S. warships were already blowing up suspected narco‑trafficking boats off Venezuela’s coast, and Machado defended the pressure while insisting Venezuelans did “not want a war.” “It was Nicolás Maduro who started this war,” she said, accusing him of “state terrorism” at home and a “war against the Western Hemisphere democratic nations through narco terrorism,” and adding: “In order to live in peace it requires freedom…in order to gain freedom you need strength.”
She portrayed Trump as the partner who would deliver that outcome. The Nobel, she said, was a “boost” to a movement that “won by a landslide a presidential election last year” but had been repressed, and she insisted the regime could still choose a negotiated exit. The sentence that now jumps out most starkly is her conclusion: “This is the moment to stop this. This is about saving lives. Maduro started the war. President Trump is ending the war.”
What Trump actually did
In January, Trump did “end the war” in a very different fashion than Machado portrayed. A U.S. special‑operations raid in Caracas captured Maduro and flew him to New York to face drug‑trafficking and related charges, a dramatic escalation that involved air strikes on Venezuelan military infrastructure and the open assertion of U.S. control over the country’s future. “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” Trump declared in a televised address, leaving open “the possibility of more military action, ongoing involvement in that nation’s politics and oil industry.”
At the same time, senior officials in Washington coalesced around Delcy Rodríguez, a longtime Maduro lieutenant who had overseen the oil sector, as their provisional interlocutor in Caracas. According to detailed reporting, U.S. advisers viewed Rodríguez as someone who could back future American energy investments, and Trump passed over Machado, whom his team had never warmed to despite her Nobel and central role in the opposition. In public, he praised Rodríguez’s cooperation—saying she “really doesn’t have a choice”—and dismissed Machado as a “very nice woman” who “lacks the support” to lead Venezuela.
The sidelined architect of a transition
That outcome stands in sharp contrast to how Machado described the political endgame in her Fortune appearance. “Two years ago, I ran for a primary…and I won with 93% of the votes,” she recounted, before explaining how the regime banned her and then an academic ally, forcing the opposition to rally behind the little‑known Edmundo González Urrutia just two months before the election. “If you want to vote for me, you have to vote for him,” she told voters across the country, and she insisted to Fortune that “after 15 months in absolute isolation, we finally see freedom very close…we are ready to take over.”
Her economic and institutional vision was equally specific. Venezuela, she reminded viewers, has the largest oil reserves in the world and the eighth-largest natural gas reserve, yet “our people don’t even have gas even to cook.” The answer, in her telling, was to “open…markets with fair rules super competitive,” focus the state on “guaranteeing full transparency and justice” in a “full privatization process” of more than 500 confiscated companies, and restore the rule of law in a country she noted was “currently in the last place all over the world in terms of rule of law.”
“Venezuela will be the single biggest business economic opportunity for decades to come in this region,” she said, promising “clear strict stable rules” and “great fiscal incentives” so that “anybody that invests in Venezuela knows” what to expect.
Today, analysts still see that agenda—and Machado and González—as the core of a plausible transitional government, with one expert recently telling Fox News Digital that “Machado and González would assume a transitional government in Venezuela” and that “they have the support of 70% of Venezuelans.” Yet the power to define the transition currently sits in Washington and in the hands of a former regime insider, not with the Nobel laureate who spent years demanding that foreign governments treat Maduro as the head of a criminal enterprise rather than a sovereign equal.
Where her narrative clashes with reality
Machado’s description of Venezuela’s collapse is stark: a once‑rich country gutted by misrule, an exodus of “a third of our population,” an economy that “has collapsed…over 80%,” and a state that “has turned into…a safe haven for criminal activities from all over the world.” Her insistence that the regime was a regional security threat, not just a domestic authoritarian problem, helped lay the moral groundwork for tougher sanctions, criminal cases, and cooperation among law‑enforcement agencies that ultimately culminated in Maduro’s capture.
But the way the story has unfolded diverges sharply from the democratic script she outlined. Machado imagined foreign law‑enforcement tools and financial transparency clearing the way for an “orderly transition to democracy in Venezuela” led by an opposition whose mandate she described as overwhelming. Instead, Trump has claimed the right for the United States to administer the country “until a safe transition” while signaling that access to Venezuelan oil and the pliability of a successor elite matter at least as much as honoring the opposition’s electoral mandate or the Nobel laureate’s political project.
“Venezuela is the center, the hub of regional destabilization,” Machado told Fortune, arguing that once “Maduro goes, we will see not only this huge opportunity for democracy and for investment, but also to stabilize the region.” Maduro has now gone in exactly the way she feared—through a foreign military raid that leaves Venezuelans spectators to their own transition—and the contest she tried to preempt is underway: between a movement that thinks it “is ready to take over” and a superpower that has decided, as Trump put it, that “we are going to run the country” first.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com