María Corina Machado Returns to Venezuela After More Than 10 Months in Exile
Machado announced her return on X on Oct. 25 and appeared at a church in Barquisimeto, according to her campaign team, returning to a political transition that has moved ahead without her.
Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado announced on Sunday that she had returned to Venezuela after more than 10 months in exile, writing on X, “Estoy aquí. Con ustedes,” or “I’m here. With you.”
She gave no details about how she entered the country. Within hours, according to her campaign team, she appeared among worshippers at the Church of Santa Rosa in Barquisimeto, in the western state of Lara, where crowds pressed in around her and chanted her name. Her party said she had gone to the church to give thanks to the Divina Pastora, one of Venezuela’s most revered images of the Virgin Mary.
Edmundo González Urrutia, who ran in Machado’s place in the 2024 presidential election, confirmed her return on X, writing, “Today is a very important day for Venezuelans.” González Urrutia, who fled Venezuela in 2024 after threats of arrest and now lives in exile in Spain, said he would join her soon.
A transition that moved on without her
Machado returns to a country that has changed since she left. In January, U.S. forces captured former leader Nicolás Maduro in Caracas and flew him to New York to face drug trafficking charges. President Donald Trump then backed Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, who became acting president, and the transition that followed has been negotiated largely without Machado or González Urrutia.
Trump, speaking to reporters on Sunday, said he knew nothing about Machado’s return before it happened. “I hope she’s safe. She’s a very nice woman,” he said. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on X that her safe return was “the direct result of the U.S. supported reconciliation talks which has already seen hundreds of political prisoners freed and hundreds of political opposition figures return from exile,” and that the United States expects the freedoms of all sectors of Venezuelan politics to continue to be respected.
Machado has called for elections to be held soon and wants a presidential vote by July 2027, proposing July 24, the birthday of independence hero Simón Bolívar. Washington has said Venezuela must stabilize first, and no election has been scheduled. Rodríguez has stayed on beyond the period she was authorized by the Venezuelan constitution to serve as acting president, according to USA Today.
Her path back was long. Machado won the opposition’s presidential primary in 2023, but Maduro’s government barred her from the ballot, and she backed González Urrutia instead. After the July 2024 election, the opposition published voting tallies that showed he had won decisively, while electoral authorities declared Maduro the victor, a result rejected by the United States and international observers. Briefly detained after a protest in January 2025, Machado hid inside Venezuela for 11 months, then escaped in secret in December and resurfaced in Oslo, where she received the Nobel Peace Prize.
On Oct. 22, three days before her return, thousands of people marched in Caracas, Valencia, Maracaibo and other cities in what Reuters called the first nationwide opposition protest in nearly two years, carrying her portrait and banners reading “Hasta el final,” or “until the end,” and demanding an election date, freedom for political prisoners and her safe return.
Reporting based on coverage by NPR and USA Today.
