Venezuelan leader who won Nobel Peace Prize was a 2009 Yale World Fellow

The year before 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado was elected to Venezuela’s legislative assembly with a record number of votes, she was a World Fellow at Yale. 

Since 2002, the World Fellows program has sponsored an annual cohort of 16 global leaders to come to Yale’s campus for four months. The fellows “contribute to Yale’s intellectual life, give talks and participate on panels, collaborate with peers, audit classes, and mentor students,” according to the program’s website. Well-known alumni have included Alexei Navalny — a Russian pro-democracy politician who died in Russian prison in 2024 — and Jake Sullivan, former President Joe Biden’s national security advisor.

“Back then, in 2009, she was clearly brave and a woman of tremendous integrity, and she campaigned for electoral solutions to political problems,” 2009 World Fellow Alexander Evans said in a phone interview. “In a world where autocracy is always breathing down the neck of democracy, the threat from within as much as the threat from without, that’s worth recognizing.” 

“At least for me, I think this feels like a very, very fitting choice for the prize,” Evans said.

Before she stepped foot on Yale’s campus as a World Fellow, Machado was already a notable opposition leader against the regime of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, according to Evans. Throughout her time at Yale, Evans said, her dedication to the pursuit of democracy in Venezuela was apparent.

After being expelled from the Venezuelan National Assembly 10 years prior, Machado sought to run in the country’s 2024 presidential election but was banned from seeking public office by President Nicolás Maduro’s government for her role in anti-government protests. 

According to vote tallies released by the opposition, her replacement, Edmundo González Urrutia, won the election. The Maduro government, however, rejected the results and claimed victory, without offering proof. Machado then went into hiding amid threats.

“She would have, I think, stood as the opposition candidate, if the regime had let her,” Evans said. “We all deeply admire her. And bear in mind that the cohort is not all politically in one direction, but all of us, I think, admired María Corina. She was someone who was campaigning for democracy and proper political competition and an open society.”

The Norwegian Nobel Committee selected Machado as the 2025 Peace Prize laureate “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” 

The committee’s decision, however, has come under fire due to Machado’s support for American efforts to oust Maduro. In a Sunday interview with NPR, Machado dedicated her prize to “the people of Venezuela and President Trump.”

Yale professor Greg Grandin GRD ’95 ’99, a left-wing historian who has criticized American intervention in Latin America, called the committee’s decision “really a shocking” and “disastrous” choice in a Friday interview with Democracy Now. 

“Machado is not a unifier, as the committee said. She represents the most intransigent face of the opposition, and not just against Maduro, but against, you know, a democratically elected Hugo Chávez,” Grandin said. “I mean, they didn’t give it to Donald Trump, but they seem to have given it to the next best thing.”

Grandin did not immediately respond to the News’ requests for comment.

“I know that there’s been some voices saying, well, you know, is she the right candidate to get it,” Evans said. “I just hope that even those who are skeptical of Maria Carina’s politics, or they don’t agree with where she comes from, recognize the character and integrity that she brings. She was warm, engaging, deeply loyal to the cohort, and the cohort feels deeply loyal to her.”

Machado is the 20th woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize out of 111 laureates.