The Iron Lady of Liberty in Latin America - María Corina Machado

On Oct. 10, 2025, María Corina Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to advance democracy in Venezuela. The following is an article from our Winter 2024 Freedom's Champion magazine. Click here to access previous editions.

As Venezuelans went to the polls on July 28, 2024, a long-planned operation was taking place all around them. Six hundred thousand volunteers stood ready, and, when voting closed, they leapt into action. Under the direction of a plan named simply “600k,” they collected copies of the voting results from each polling location and uploaded them to a central internet database. Thanks to their efforts, the accurate results were clear before the regime had time to tell the official—and untrue— story that Maduro had won.

In fact, data collected by the 600k campaign showed that opposition candidate Edmundo González won in a landslide, capturing nearly 70% of the votes. But it wasn’t Edmundo who organized and led the operation. That job was held by María Corina Machado, who has come to be known as the “Iron Lady of Liberty” in Latin America. Arbitrarily barred from the presidential race by the regime despite winning her primary with 92% of the vote, María Corina would not be prevented from continuing to work for the freedom of the Venezuelan people and an end to the country’s brutal dictatorship.

Her rise to prominence and dedication to liberty isn’t new, however. For over two decades, since the rise of Hugo Chávez to political power in her country, she has consistently stood up to authoritarianism, at home and abroad, and she has become one of the most powerful voices of the freedom movement, not just in her native Venezuela but throughout the world. A former industrial engineer who once served as a member of Venezuela’s National Assembly, María Corina has been a long-time ally of Atlas Network.

For years, she worked closely with local Atlas Network partner organization Cedice Libertad to advance classical liberal ideas. In the past decade, she and others also formed their own organization, Libre Desarrollo, with similar goals.

For years, María Corina has rallied the opposition to bring about a peaceful but conclusive end to the Chávez-Maduro regime and return economic freedom and individual rights to the country. That work culminated, for now, with González’s presidential campaign and the operation to secure an accurate record of the voting results.

Despite many setbacks, María Corina has remained steadfast in her vision for a free Venezuela. As she shared in an interview with Rolling
Stone earlier this year: We are going to make Venezuela fly. We are going to turn Venezuela into the energy hub of the Americas . . . and a renewable powerhouse. But this [cannot be done] without a system of freedoms. People are not going to invest in a country where there is no trust, where private property is worth nothing. [We] want to stop migration, not by closing the border, but rather people voluntarily returning to their country because everything can be done here. . . . This is the moment to secure change.

She has articulated variations of this message on several occasions at Atlas Network’s annual Latin America Liberty Forum and most recently
in an episode of our Freedom Worldwide webinar with Dr. Tom Palmer, held shortly after the Venezuelan election.

In the opening Cornerstone Talk of our 2024 Liberty Forum & Freedom Dinner in New York City, María Corina also delivered a powerful virtual address explaining how the freedom movement in
Venezuela is still fighting for this vision in the face of incredible odds.

But María Corina’s efforts transcend Venezuela’s borders. She has supported the work of allied organizations across Latin America, from Caminos de la Libertad in Mexico to Fundación Libertad in Argentina and Fundación para el Progreso in Chile. She has become a symbol of hope and of how, indeed, we can “dare to be utopian” against
all odds and in the face of violence and authoritarian terror. Her struggle “hasta el final” (until the end) has become a source of inspiration for freedom champions in her country, in the region, and
the world at large.

It’s no wonder then that she was awarded the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and she was recently named the 2024 recipient—together with Edmundo González—of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

In the “Toast to Freedom” during Atlas Network’s Latin America Liberty Forum 2024, held in Costa Rica earlier this year, María Corina Machado, the “Iron Lady of Liberty,” was singled out as “the most courageous freedom fighter in Latin America.” Perhaps we should have said, “in the entire world.”

The situation in Venezuela remains dire. Nicolás Maduro stole the election in the most blatant example of electoral fraud in Latin America’s modern history. Aided by the Cuban regime, he has unleashed a wave of violent repression, arresting and torturing dissidents and issuing an arrest warrant for Mr. González, which forced him to leave the country and go into exile. Dozens have been killed and several thousand detained, including women and children groundlessly accused of “terrorism.”

Those affected include María Oropeza, a brave 30-year-old leader who has attended Atlas Network events. She has been imprisoned for simply standing up for the cause of freedom. Edwin Santos, another regional leader of the opposition, was recently found tortured and murdered. Pedro Urruchurtu, now head of Libre Desarrollo, is in forced asylum in the Argentine embassy. The list goes on of opposition leaders and freedom champions who have been imprisoned, killed, or otherwise harmed by the regime for peacefully standing up for their convictions.

Yet, María Corina has continued her struggle, with her now famous slogan, hasta el final. Her courage in the face of tyranny and two decades of misery under Bolivarian socialism exemplifies Hayek’s call that members of the classical liberal movement should “dare to be utopian” in their vision for a better world.

In María Corina’s own words, “What will happen to me physically, I do not know. What I do know is that the destiny of this struggle is for freedom in my country, and that is something that transcends myself, and everyone.”