One of the highlights of my career took place this past winter in Oslo. I had the opportunity to attend the ceremonies around María Corina Machado's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize for her work standing up for freedom and transparent elections in Venezuela.

She arrived in Oslo only after an extraordinary journey. Having spent more than a year in hiding from the Maduro regime inside Venezuela, she escaped in disguise, was taken by boat into open ocean, met there by a rescue, brought to Curaçao, and flown from there to Norway. When she finally joined us, emotions were high and the world watched with admiration. It felt like a victory for everyone who had sacrificed for freedom in Venezuela. For everyone in the worldwide freedom movement, really.

The months since have been a reminder that recognition and resolution are not the same thing. With Maduro's removal from power, the regime's structure has been disrupted but not dismantled. The path to a free and fair election in Venezuela remains uncertain, and the Venezuelan freedom movement continues to drive toward that goal. María Corina has said she will return to Venezuela to stand as a candidate when elections are held — the same candidacy the regime barred her from in 2024.

I have received many questions, in the months since Oslo, about "what's next" in Venezuela. I do my best to faithfully relay the cautious optimism I hear from our friends inside the country, who are at times frustrated by uncertainties about the U.S.-led transition, but who believe the future is far brighter than Venezuela's recent past.

This answer never seems fully satisfying to the questioner. I often have to clarify that Atlas Network has no aspirations of shaping U.S. foreign policy or global geopolitics, other than strengthening the voice of our local partners as they advance liberty where they can.

Atlas Network first partnered with pro-freedom think tanks in Venezuela in the early 1980s. María Corina first joined us at Freedom Dinner in 2005 — and returned as our keynote speaker at the 2009 gala, marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The work that brought her to Oslo was already a generation old by the time the world was watching. When she has expressed gratitude to Atlas Network, it has not been for a role in the final hours of her struggle. It's been because we have been there from the beginning.

The Nobel did not end her work. It simply happened in the middle of it.

That distinction becomes clearer when we step back to look at the longer arc of the worldwide freedom movement.

Atlas Network traces its origin story to a conversation in 1945 between a 30-year-old former Royal Air Force pilot who had flown in the Battle of Britain — Antony Fisher — and Friedrich Hayek, a scholar sixteen years older than Fisher who had just published The Road to Serfdom. Hayek advised against Fisher's plans to enter politics directly. He said it was more important to shape the intellectual climate in the direction of freedom.

Fisher took that advice seriously. He wrote a book called The Case for Freedom. He joined the Mont Pelerin Society. He learned about the recently founded Foundation for Economic Education in the U.S. He tweaked the model to establish the first free-market think tank in London: the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA).

After the platform of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had demonstrated the influence of the IEA, Fisher moved to San Francisco — into the same apartment building as Milton and Rose Friedman — and turned his attention to North America, helping found think tanks in the United States and Canada. Milton offered to write a letter endorsing Fisher's idea of creating Atlas Network to replicate the success of the IEA wherever it could take root. In this, he was joined also by Thatcher and by Hayek.

By the time of Atlas Network's founding in 1981, both Hayek and Milton Friedman had been recognized with the Nobel Prize in Economics — in 1974 and 1976, respectively. Just as with María Corina, worldwide attention came long after collaboration began. Recognition followed impact. It did not create it.

Early in my own time at Atlas Network, I had an experience that brought into sharper focus the reality that we should not underestimate the people with whom we collaborate in the worldwide freedom movement.

At an Atlas Network event in 1999, I was seated next to Esca Hayek, Friedrich Hayek's daughter-in-law. She listened with some amusement as others spoke about Hayek's legacy in reverential terms — mentioning him in the same breath as Aristotle and Adam Smith. For her, he had simply been "dad."

It was a small moment, but a revealing one. History offers no warnings about who will be remembered as great. It may be the unassuming scholar down the hall, or the eager intern who arrives early and stays late.

I look back at Atlas Network's history — collaborating with Hernando de Soto before he created tidal waves in development economics; Jimmy Lai before he became a martyr for democratic values in Hong Kong; Mario Vargas Llosa before his Nobel Prize in literature; and Sir John Templeton when he was known as a contrarian investor but not yet as the contrarian philanthropist who would establish our most important honor, Atlas Network's Templeton Freedom Award.

These individuals varied widely in their callings — activism, business, culture, philanthropy. What they share is a sustained commitment to advancing the principles of free societies. And it is impossible to look at their work without recognizing how they drew inspiration from — and gave inspiration back to — the ecosystem of organizations we call the freedom movement.

This is where Atlas Network's role is best understood. We do not exist to identify future laureates or to associate ourselves with recognition after the fact. Our focus is earlier and less visible. The freedom movement is, in the end, a community of people willing to do unglamorous work out of conviction — and to keep doing it long before, and long after, the world is watching.

Principled champions of freedom often work in isolation, without the community, the support, or the signals to know whether they are being as ambitious and effective as they could be. Atlas Network brings them into a worldwide network where they can sharpen their work against peers, compete for resources and recognition, and see their successes amplified back through the movement. That is what we mean when we describe our strategy as Coach, Compete, Celebrate.

We were just in Lima for our 11th annual Latin America Liberty Forum, where the energy of the freedom movement was on full display. Across the region, advocates for free societies are operating under conditions that would have tested any previous generation — and yet have adapted, becoming more effective at translating principles into policies that resonate within their societies. You will meet some of them elsewhere in this issue.

Venezuela remains the most visible example. And even there, the work of advancing freedom did not begin with María Corina, and it does not rest only on her.

Leaders like Jesús Armas represent a generation shaped by these realities. Jesús came to the freedom movement as a university student in Caracas, when Rocío Guijarro of Cedice Libertad — Atlas Network's longest-standing partner in Venezuela — handed him a copy of The Road to Serfdom. He has said the book changed his life — the same book that had moved Antony Fisher to seek out Hayek at the London School of Economics.

He went on to found Ciudadanía sin Límites, a Venezuelan think tank dedicated to advancing the ideas of a free society. After the Maduro regime stole Venezuela's 2024 presidential election, Jesús was imprisoned for fourteen months. He was released this past February and returned to work — including a visit to Washington to advocate for free and fair elections, and time with Atlas Network colleagues before heading home. He is now back in Venezuela, where he is again building the institutional muscle of a free society. You can read his story in full elsewhere in this issue. "I don't think of myself as a victim," he has said. "I think of myself as a non-violent freedom fighter."

He is now where Hayek was in the 1930s — a working scholar whose ideas had not yet reached beyond his field — where Vargas Llosa was in the 1960s, where María Corina herself was in 2009 when she returned to us as keynote speaker at Freedom Dinner. The world is not yet honoring him. But it should be paying attention.

Seen in this light, the moment in Oslo takes on a different meaning. What the world witnessed was not simply the recognition of one individual's achievements, important as those are. It was a visible milestone in a much longer process — one that begins long before global attention arrives and continues long after it moves on.

Atlas Network exists to support that work. It is a place where individuals committed to these principles can find resources, connections, and a community that understands both the challenges and the stakes involved. It is a place where today's emerging leaders can learn from those who have come before them.

As you read this, there are courageous freedom champions hard at work in Caracas, in La Paz, in São Paulo, and in cities and towns across more than a hundred countries. Most of them you have not yet heard of. Some of them, in time, the world will learn.

Atlas Network will be there for them, as we were for the freedom champions who inspired them to first enter the arena.