I don’t regret gifting Nobel prize to Trump: Venezuela’s Machado

Maria Corina Machado presents U.S. President Donald Trump with her Nobel Peace Prize, Jan. 15, 2026. (The White House / X)

Venezuela’s opposition leader Maria Corina Machado said on Saturday she had “no regrets” about symbolically handing over her Nobel Peace Prize to US President Donald Trump in January.

“There is a leader in the world, a head of state in the world who risked the lives of his country’s citizens for Venezuela’s freedom,” she told a news conference in Madrid.

Machado presented her Nobel prize to Trump when she met him in the White House just two weeks after he ordered US forces to attack Caracas and snatch Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.

Trump, who has long coveted the award, is currently embroiled in the Middle East war he started with his ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with airstrikes on Iran at the end of February.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the peace prize, made clear after Machado handed her 2025 Nobel medal to Trump that the actual honour it represents “cannot be revoked, shared, or transferred to others”.

Machado said Trump’s military operation to snatch Maduro, who is currently detained in New York facing US drug charges, was “something we Venezuelans will never forget”.

“Consequently,” she said, “no, I have no regrets” about gifting her Nobel medal to Trump.

Machado, who was in hiding before leaving Venezuela in December to collect her Nobel prize in Oslo, said she was organizing her return to the country in coordination with Washington.

Later, she told thousands of supporters at a gathering in Madrid that they should be preparing to go back home.

“Everything we have done over these long 27 years has been to prepare ourselves for a moment of reunion and of building a nation that will be free forever,” she said, referring to the period under Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez.

Venezuela’s opposition last week called for presidential elections.

Machado, who has not yet said if she would run in a future poll, was banned from running for president in the 2024 election that resulted in Maduro claiming a re-election victory that opposition groups say was rigged.