Скачать или смотреть Watch Her CONFRONT Hugo Chavez in Front of the Entire Country: Nobel Winner Maria Corina Machado

On 10 October, Venezuelan opposition politician María Corina Machado, who has long been the face of resistance to Venezuela's 26-year ruling party, won the Nobel peace prize for her dogged struggle to rescue the South American country from its fate as "a brutal, authoritarian state".

Machado, an industrial engineer and daughter of a steel magnate, began challenging the ruling party in 2004, when the non-governmental organization she co-founded, Súmate, promoted a referendum to recall then-President Hugo Chávez. The initiative failed, and Machado and other Súmate executives were charged with conspiracy.

Her full transformation into a politician would come until 2010, when she was elected to a seat in the National Assembly, receiving more votes than any aspiring lawmaker ever. It was from this position that she boldly interrupted Chávez as he addressed the legislature and called his expropriation of businesses "theft", challenging him to a public debate.

"An eagle does not hunt a fly," he responded, mocking Machado.

Since Chávez's death in 2013, Machado has taken the fight to his protégé and successor Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

She has spent the last year living in hiding after her political movement was widely believed to have beaten Maduro in the July 2024 presidential election.

Maduro refused to accept he had lost to Machado’s ally, the former diplomat Edmundo González, and launched a ferocious political crackdown that forced González into exile and Machado to go underground.

In one of her last public appearances in Caracas, Machado said she was convinced Maduro’s days in power were numbered after his apparently stinging defeat. "I would say his departure is irreversible," she told reporters.

The Nobel committee celebrated Machado’s long struggle for democracy in a statement that called her :one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times".

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