As Iran burns—with thousands jailed, tortured, and killed by a theocracy that is desperate to preserve its power—and as Venezuela reels from the U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro, two female Nobel Peace Prize winners who helped undercut these regimes now stand alone. One has been restrained by state repression inside her homeland, the other sidelined by geopolitical currents outside it.
On October 10, 2025, María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s most prominent opposition leader, was awarded the Nobel for her decades-long struggle to achieve, in the Nobel Committee’s words, “a peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” Before Machado could accept it, she first had to receive it, which she did by fleeing Venezuela in darkness and in disguise on a small fishing skiff to Curaçao, then boarding a private jet to Oslo.
