“We will arrive to embrace each other, to work together, to guarantee an unstoppable transition,” she said in a video.
14ymedio/ EFE, Caracas, 2 March 2026 — Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado said Sunday that she will return to her country in “a few weeks” to consolidate a major national agreement among various sectors and prepare, she said, for a “new and gigantic” electoral victory.
“I will return to Venezuela in a few weeks. I want to do so, as do hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan exiles around the world,” the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate said in a video posted on her social media. “We will arrive to embrace each other, to work together, to guarantee an orderly, sustainable, and unstoppable transition to democracy,” she added.
Machado indicated that there is a clear roadmap to follow, among them, strengthening the “unity of Venezuelans” that began with the opposition primaries of 2023 and continued with the commands, political and social organizations for the 2024 presidential elections, in which the electoral body – aligned with Chavismo – proclaimed the victory of Nicolás Maduro.
The opposition leader insisted that the victory in those elections belonged to the candidate of the majority opposition, Edmundo González Urrutia.
She also argued that it is necessary to finalize a major national agreement with political and social organizations and leaders to establish consensus to “achieve governability throughout this transition process and in democratic Venezuela.”
“First we had to defeat them spiritually, then politically, then electorally, and finally militarily. We said it was going to happen, and it did. On January 3, a legitimate president was not captured because Nicolás Maduro had already been defeated on July 28, 2024,” she adds.
Machado thanked the United States, its government, congressmen, judges and military personnel who “risked their lives for the freedom of Venezuela,” referring to the capture of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in an attack on Caracas and three other nearby regions on January 3.
“President Donald Trump, with vision and courage, brought Nicolás Maduro to justice before international law,” she noted.
The former congresswoman stated that the government led by Delcy Rodríguez wants to “buy time.” “The regime currently in power in Venezuela is the same. They are the ones who have tortured, persecuted, imprisoned, disappeared, murdered, expropriated, and lied,” she said. “But everything has changed, and now they have to follow instructions to move forward with dismantling the repression, recovering our country’s economy, and advancing toward the transition.”
On February 6, Machado said that there could be democratic elections in Venezuela in less than a year, according to an interview published with the digital media outlet Politico.
“Everything has changed, and now they have to follow instructions to move forward with dismantling the repression, the economic recovery of our country, and to advance towards the transition.”
“We believe that a real transition process with manual voting (…) the whole process could be completed in nine or ten months. But, well, that depends on when it starts,” said Machado, who left Venezuela in December for Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, after spending almost a year in hiding.
The Amnesty Law, approved by the Venezuelan Parliament on February 19, has an article that excludes from the beneficiaries those who have been or may be prosecuted for “promoting, instigating, requesting, invoking, favoring, facilitating, financing or participating in armed or forceful actions against the people, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, by foreign States, corporations or persons.”
Chavismo accuses Machado, precisely, of having promoted the US military intervention, which would initially exclude her.
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