What is bravery? It’s continuing to fight for something even when you are afraid.

María Corina Machado is a 58-year-old former member of the Venezuelan Parliament and industrial engineer who has been fighting against dictators since 2002. In response to President Hugo Chávez, she started a nonprofit called Súmate whose sole purpose was to inspire her fellow countrymen to become politically aware and to fight against Venezuela’s downward spiral.

In 2010, she was elected to Parliament. For her outspokenness against the regime, government thugs beat her up and broke her nose in 2013 — but she did not back down. Her fearlessness has earned her the nickname “Iron Lady.”

La han golpeado y ella ha respondido con más trabajo no violento, por eso galoparon en las elecciones presidenciales del 28 de julio 2024.
Premio Nobel de la Paz para @MariaCorinaYA pic.twitter.com/yngZYV51ZX

— Venezolanos Unidos por la #LibertadParaVenezuela (@AliomarBracho) October 10, 2025

In 2024, President Nicolás Maduro decided he could safely rig the election once again and allowed the people to vote, though he made sure to bar Machado from being able to run. Undaunted, she set up a proxy candidate, Edmundo González, to represent the opposition party. Machado organized witnesses, took pictures of all the voter tallies, and uploaded the results to the Internet. González won 70% of the vote.

Did Maduro step down from power? Not at all. He had set himself up as a drug kingpin and a leading regional narco terrorist. He is raking in the dough while the children of Venezuela are starving, the country has a moribund economy, and its people have no freedoms. Maduro’s strategy to silence Machado was to issue a warrant for her arrest.

Machado has been in hiding ever since, though she still keeps the fires of liberation burning through clandestine means of communication. Last week, she won the Nobel Peace Prize for her tireless efforts to bring freedom back to her country, which is drowning in socialism.

Many were initially disappointed with this choice, especially when considering that President Donald Trump just ended the Israel/Hamas war and had diffused multiple other global conflicts during his first 10 months back in the White House. To her credit, Machado posted this message on social media, accepting the award but dedicating her prize to President Trump:

This recognition of the struggle of all Venezuelans is a boost to conclude our task: to conquer Freedom. We are on the threshold of victory and today, more than ever, we count on President Trump, the people of the United States, the peoples of Latin America, and the democratic nations of the world as our principal allies to achieve Freedom and democracy. I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause!

In snubbing Trump, the Nobel Committee accidentally underscored its own hypocrisy and validated the actions of Trump regarding his explosive approach to Venezuelan drug runners heading toward the U.S. Trump and Machado are natural allies in this fight against Maduro, and with her response, Machado brilliantly made ameliorating the horrors of living under a narco terrorist dictator a global priority.

Leftists were outraged that Machado would turn such an honor into a tribute to President Trump.

Please change this statement. I’m sure you’d like him to stop blowing up your innocent fisherman, but this isn’t the way to do it.

Rewarding dictators only makes them worse.

— The Great Gig in the Sky (@thegreatgig8) October 11, 2025

They are also mad that Machado once appealed to Israel for help in Venezuela.

Machado, in a rare and recent interview with Venezuelan filmmaker and writer Jonathan Jakubowicz, said:

Twenty-six years ago, Venezuelan youth fell in love with a socialist in Hugo Chávez. When people pointed to Cuba as a warning, they said, “Venezuela is not Cuba. And Cuba is not real socialism.” But here we are — worse than Cuba. Socialism always follows the same pattern. It elevates the state above the citizen, strips away your autonomy, your conscience, your dignity, your ability to choose. And it does so with a seductive lie. It whispers of equality, but the only equality it delivers is at the bottom — where everyone is dragged down together. That has been the case in every nation, on every continent, in every culture where it has been tried. The result is always the same: a gigantic state that crushes the people beneath it, and once it takes hold, it is terribly hard to remove.

She then warned the United States — where the lure of socialism is becoming ever more mainstream (see New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani) — that socialism is the path to destruction.

And it is why I say to the American people: Do not be seduced. Socialism is the sexiest path to losing your freedom. Guard your freedom jealously. Defend it fiercely. Because freedom is not just an American promise — it is the hope of the world.

These are powerful words from a brave woman who is putting everything on the line to save her country and its people.

Image credit: Gabo Bracho, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.