Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, announced on Sunday (25) that she is back in Venezuela after just over ten months abroad. "I am here. With you", she wrote on the social network X, without saying how she entered the country. Images released by her team showed her at the Divina Pastora sanctuary in Santa Rosa, in Lara state, where she greeted and embraced supporters of her Vente Venezuela party during a religious celebration, according to the Mexican newspaper Excélsior.
The return was confirmed by former presidential candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, who has been outside Venezuela since September 2024 and said on X that he will join her "very soon". Her arrival comes about ten months after a United States military operation removed then president Nicolás Maduro, who is jailed on American soil, according to an Associated Press report published by the Brazilian newspaper Estadão.
"Today is a very important day for Venezuelans. Our sovereign voice returns with her to lead and guide this process! You know: this goes all the way", González Urrutia wrote.
For Brazil, the Venezuelan outcome matters directly. The two countries share a border of roughly 2,200 kilometers, and the state of Roraima became, from 2018 on, the main entry point for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants received through Operação Acolhida, a federal program backed by the United Nations refugee agency. Brazil's foreign ministry also conditioned any recognition of the July 2024 election result on the publication of the voting tallies, a stance that kept Brasília as an interlocutor of both chavismo and the opposition. The timing is notable: Machado's return falls on the same Sunday Brazilians vote in the second round of their presidential election, and whichever administration takes office will inherit a Venezuela whose transition is effectively run from Washington.
Pressure for an election date and the map of interests
Since Maduro's removal, Venezuela has been governed by interim president Delcy Rodríguez, a longtime chavista ally who received the Trump administration's backing to succeed him. According to Estadão, Rodríguez has already exceeded the period she was authorized to serve as interim president, and no elections are scheduled. Machado and her allies are demanding a date for a presidential vote, while American officials have stressed that stabilizing the economy must come first. The arrangement lays out each side's interests: Washington wants a predictable Venezuela open to investment, the opposition wants to turn the political capital of the Nobel and the contested 2024 result into votes, and the remaining chavista core is trying to preserve room inside the provisional setup.
The return caps months of failed attempts. Machado spent 11 months in hiding in Venezuela after being briefly detained during a protest in January 2025, and left the country through a clandestine route, resurfacing in December of that year in Norway, where she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her peaceful opposition to Maduro's government. In September, according to Excélsior, her team said she had faced at least seven setbacks in attempts to return, by sea routes, commercial flights, private flights and land travel; in one of them, she was reportedly blocked from leaving Panama by air. Neither the opposition leader nor the interim government disclosed the conditions under which her entry into the country finally took place.