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Venezuelan opposition leader and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Colina Machado will arrive in Washington this week for high-stakes talks with US President Donald Trump about the future of Venezuela after the ouster of President Nicolas Maduro. The meeting came after President Trump surprised many by allowing Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, to take over, dashing opposition hopes for a new democratic era.
The past 12 months have been a roller coaster for Machado. One year ago this week, she was seen in Caracas struggling to cheer up a crowd against Mr. Maduro, the authoritarian leader who is beginning his third term as Venezuela’s president, after electoral authorities declared him the winner of the 2024 presidential election, although no detailed results were made public and there was no evidence that Mr. Machado’s candidate, Edmundo González, defeated him in a landslide.
It was the last time Machado was seen in public until last month, when he emerged from hiding to collect his bounty in Norway after escaping capture by Maduro’s forces and daringly fleeing Venezuela.
But this month, Mr. Machado stood by as the United States carried out an unprecedented raid in Venezuela, capturing Maduro and his wife and taking them to New York, where they face charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking, even as Mr. Maduro’s old allies remain in power in Caracas. Both have maintained their innocence.
Throughout this period, Machado has been trying to curry favor with President Trump. She has courted controversy, first by clumsily supporting the White House’s strategy to target alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean, many of them Venezuelans, despite scant public evidence to justify the airstrikes, and then by dedicating her controversial Nobel Prize to Mr. Trump himself, who has been openly campaigning for the award for years.
Despite the public enthusiasm and repeated praise of the US president, at the fateful moment of Maduro’s ouster, it was not Machado who was backed by President Trump to take over Venezuela, but rather Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s deputy and longtime ally and veteran bodyguard.
In some ways, Machado is a victim of his own success. She is not seeking a Nobel Prize, and her nomination in August 2024 was presented by none other than President Trump’s own Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others. Still, it’s no secret that the president was personally outraged by the decision, declaring just last week that “no one in history deserves the Nobel Prize more than I do.”
One can only speculate as to how Mr. Trump views Mr. Machado, who won the award he believes is his own.
Sources close to Mr. Machado told CNN that as of Monday night, the two leaders had not spoken since October, when Mr. Machado offered the honor to Mr. Trump, an act the US president described as “very impressive.”
Machado and her representatives declined to comment for this article.
Machado knows he needs to make a comeback if he wants to win back President Trump’s support.
In an interview with CBS, opposition leaders criticized Rodríguez’s ascent, noting that the new acting president has been under U.S. sanctions since 2017 for human rights violations and that she is deeply involved in running the notorious El Helicoido prison, a former department store site considered one of the Venezuelan government’s largest torture centers.
Mr. Rodriguez has repeatedly denied these allegations and may be confident that he has proven he can speak Mr. Trump’s language.
President Trump’s recent comments indicate that he considers the stability and business opportunities associated with oil exports to be a greater and pressing concern than Venezuela’s freedom and democracy.
At least for now, Machado doesn’t appear to be able to make an offer to Trump either. The White House assesses that if Mr. Rodriguez had taken power after Mr. Maduro’s ouster, he would not have had enough support within the military and security services to run Venezuela. For years, Rodriguez has been busy proving that the U.S. president can be trusted.
In 2017, at the height of Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis when Mr. Rodriguez was foreign minister, Mr. Caracas donated $500,000 to Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee through his oil subsidiary CITGO4.
One of Rodriguez’s first appointments as acting president was to appoint Calixto Ortega, a former CITGO executive and Columbia University graduate, as vice president for economic affairs, as he seeks business opportunities with American companies.
The ultimate proof of this new deal came last week, when President Trump publicly stated that his administration “works very well with the people of Venezuela and the people who are running Venezuela.”
The renewed praise came after Rodriguez offered to ship millions of barrels of oil to the United States and allowed US Chargé d’Affaires Joe McNamara to visit to explore the possibility of reopening the US embassy in Caracas, which has been closed since 2019.
Machado is unable to provide any of these at this time. She doesn’t control her country, she doesn’t control the oil that Trump openly covets, and she can’t pay White House lobbyists millions of dollars to advance her cause.
But she is counting on the support of many people in Washington. That includes Mr. Rubio, with whom he has had a personal relationship over the years.
Mr. Trump is known to make important decisions based on his personal impressions of people’s characters, and it worked to Mr. Trump’s advantage that Mr. Machado met with him in person, while Mr. Rodriguez was only able to communicate by phone.
The constant ebb and flow surrounding the Ukraine war shows that nothing is resolved for the better under Trump 2.0, and Machado will relish the challenge of turning a disadvantage into a success.
The last mentor, who underestimated her skill and willpower, now sits in a prison cell in Brooklyn.
