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.