After almost a year in exile — and having repeated attempts to return reportedly blocked by President Donald Trump — popular democratic opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado is now back in Venezuela, raising hopes for new elections there.
"I am here. With you," Machado posted on X at around noon Sunday as she appeared at a church in Venezuela's Lara state.
Machado had previously been in Panama. She had been in exile since last December, when she clandestinely escaped Venezuela — where she'd been in hiding from the brutal and corrupt ruling regime — to receive her Nobel Prize in Norway.
Since then — and especially after U.S. special forces raided Caracas on Jan. 3 to arrest then dictator Nicolás Maduro and whisk him to New York to face drug-trafficking charges — Machado's repeated attempts to return to Venezuela have been thwarted.
Trump himself has been widely blamed for that. Because of Machado's overwhelming popularity in Venezuela, her return there was seen to complicate his efforts to negotiate oil deals and other matter with Maduro's vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, whom Trump has repeatedly praised as Venezuela's acting president.
Rodríguez and other regime holdovers — who stand accused of stealing the 2024 presidential election that Machado's movement proved had been won in a landslide by opposition candidate Edmundo González — had also made it clear they did not want Machado back in Venezuela.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has insisted that the U.S. was not blocking Machado's return.
But with poll after poll in showing Venezuelans strongly supporting Machado's return as well as an accelerated calendar for holding new democratic elections that she would likely win, the Trump administration appeared to have stepped aside and directed Rodríguez to drop her own resistance.
"It greatly excites me to announce that our leader, my dear María Corina Machado, is in Venezuelan territory," González, himself in exile in Spain, wrote on X.
"Today is a very important day for Venezuelans. Our sovereign voice returns with her to lead and guide this process!"
Rubio, posting on X Sunday afternoon, said Machado's safe return to Venezuela "is the direct result of the U.S. supported reconciliation talks which has already seen hundreds of political prisoners freed and hundreds of political opposition figures return from exile."
Asked by reporters Sunday about Machado’s return to Venezuela, U.S. President Donald Trump said, “I don’t know anything about it, but I think she’s a very nice woman. She gave me her Nobel Prize. So how can I say anything else? And I hope she’s safe. She’s a very nice woman. But we’re doing really well in Venezuela.”
READ MORE: Is María Corina Machado mulling a visit to Miami after her White House confab with Trump?
Venezuela's enormous diaspora — almost a quarter of the population has fled the regime's repression and economic disasters over the past decade — also hopes that democratic transition process will now move in more expedited fashion with Machado in country.
"Venezuelans at least want an election date," said Venezuelan expat Maria Alejandra Marquez, who heads the nonprofit regime watchgod INRAV in Miami.
"That's the only way the country can start moving forward, and pressure for that now is going to be more palpable, because life on the ground in Venezuela is still very hard, and that means we need deep change there for things to get better.
"Right now every repressive leader [except Maduro] that was there on Jan. 3 is still in place, and there still is risk for Venezuelans who go out and protest. It will be interesting to see how ordinary Venezuelans are now going to push the spaces of freedom more with María Corina there — and how the regime will react to that."
In an interview last week with the New York Times, Machado too insisted that the democratic transition pace be stepped up in Venezuela.
"I think that from every perspective you address the Venezuelan situation right now, it is a win-win situation to move ahead into the transition," she said.
"From the migration perspective, you have over a million Venezuelans in the U.S. Sixty-five percent of them say they want to go back if there is a democratic transition.
"And you need to have a partner that truly is committed to dismantling the terror regime, not to try to accommodate until a later moment in which they could bring it back to the previous state."
Even so, Venezuela observers caution that Machado's mere return might not be the re-democratization accelerant Venezuelans hope.
"She has returned to Venezuela, yes — but under which conditions and terms?" asked Imdat Oner, a former Turkish diplomat who served in Venezuela in the 2010s and is now a senior policy analyst at Florida International University's Gordon Institute.
"There were clearly some behind-closed-doors negotiations here — about how she will act when she returns, and I believe she will not be pushing so hard for quick change, a quick election timetable, as many might assume.
"She will likely have to be cautious and careful on mobilizing people and pushing for protests.
"Washington will still be the main actor here who will decide these things. it's still their plan, their ultimate goal."
Oner still expects a new election in Venezuela in 2028 rather than 2027 — especially, he points out, since what appears to matter to Trump as much if not more is the oil mega-deal he has negotiated with the Rodríguez interim government to have the U.S. assume control of much of Venezuela's vast oil reserves.
Trump's oil deal has come under sharp criticism since it was announced in August, largely because the fine print shows it is likely not the energy boon for the U.S. or the revenue boon for Venezuela that he and Rodríguez have claimed.
Machado herself has recently blasted the plan, largely because its central figure is a controversial, regime-linked businessman, Alejandro Betancourt, who is widely accused in and outside Venezuela of massive corruption schemes. (He denies the charges.)
Oner speculated, for example, that one of the conditions of Machado's homecoming is that she cease her own public criticism of the deal.
When Machado won the Nobel last year, Trump made it no secret how angry he was that he himself did not win the peace prize — and his critics insist that has driven his resentment toward her.
Even when Machado gave him the Nobel medal earlier this year at the White House as thanks for removing Maduro, Trump continued to dismiss her importance and lavish praise on Rodríguez.
Rodríguez, meanwhile, has been in democratic transition talks with another opposition leader, Dinorah Figuera, who returned from exile over the summer.
Their negotiations have been focused more on reform of government institutions like the judiciary.
Hundreds of political prisoners still remain behind bars in Venezuela.
