María Corina Machado, the exiled Venezuelan opposition leader and newest Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said on Thursday that the Venezuelan regime is “weaker than ever” thanks to President Donald Trump’s pressure.
Machado visited Norway on Thursday, where she answered questions from reporters and spoke positively about Trump’s recent moves to ramp up pressure on Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, The New York Times reported. Her comments came one day after the United States seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela that the Trump administration believes was part of an illegal shipping network transporting oil from Venezuela and Iran.
While Machado did not address the oil tanker seizure, she said that Trump’s recent “actions have been decisive to reach the point where we are right now, in which the regime is weaker than ever.”
“Venezuela has already been invaded. We have the Russian agents, we have the Iranian agents, we have terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, operating freely in accordance with the regime. We have the Colombian guerrilla, the drug cartels,” Machado added while speaking at a press conference alongside Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store.
Maduro’s regime has close ties to China, Russia, and Iran, and the United States has accused the Venezuelan dictator of taking part “in a corrupt and violent narco-terrorism conspiracy” that has shipped deadly drugs to American shores.
Machado fled Venezuela after she helped organize protests against the socialist government after it claimed that Maduro won the 2024 presidential election over opposition leader Edmundo González despite evidence showing that Maduro lost. Machado said on Thursday that she escaped the country with “support from the United States government.”
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Trump and Machado have spoken positively about each other in recent months after the Venezuelan leader beat out Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, a recognition that Trump has been aggressively seeking since coming back to the White House. After winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Machado said she was dedicating the award to President Trump “for his decisive support of our cause.” Trump said that Machado called him after she was announced as the Nobel Prize winner.
“A very nice thing to do,” Trump said of Machado’s call in October. “I didn’t say, ‘Then give it to me,’ though I think she might have. She was very nice.”
“I’ve been helping her along the way,” he added. “They need a lot of help in Venezuela, it’s a basic disaster. So, and you could also say it was given out for ’24 and I was running for office in ‘24.”
Trump also praised Machado in January, shortly after the Venezuelan opposition leader was forced to flee the country. Trump said that Machado was “peacefully expressing the voices and the WILL of the Venezuelan people with hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating against the regime.”
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