Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado traveled to Washington, DC, to meet with US President Donald Trump at the White House, following the kidnapping of her political opponent, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
Thursday’s meeting was the first time the two leaders met face to face.
But the visit was an unusually subdued one for Trump, who usually welcomes foreign leaders to the Oval Office for a news conference with reporters.
This time, however, Trump kept his meeting with Machado private, far from clicking the shutters of the cameras and shouting questions from the reporters.
Trump has backed Maduro’s former vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, as interim leader of the South American country, despite Machado’s claims that the opposition has a mandate to govern.
Rodriguez’s inaugural state of the union speech as President coincided with Machado’s arrival at the White House, a fact that may have contributed to the low-key nature of the meeting.
“We’re used to seeing the president bring in the cameras, make comments, speak,” Al Jazeera correspondent Mike Hanna reported as the evening descended on the capital.
“But on this particular occasion, [the meeting] it took place behind closed doors. In fact, we didn’t even have a formal reading from the White House of that meeting with Machado.”
Still, Machado struck a positive note as she exited the White House and turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue, where she was thronged by reporters and fans looking for selfies.
She and Trump spent just a few hours together at the White House, discussing the future of Venezuela over lunch.
Machado confirmed with the media that she followed through on her plans to give Trump the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor that the American President has been wanting for himself.
“I presented the president of the United States with the medal, the Nobel Peace Prize,” Machado told reporters.
As she offered the award to Trump, Machado said she told a historical anecdote, about an interaction between Simon Bolivar – the Venezuelan military officer who helped free much of South America from colonial rule – and the Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the Revolutionary War in the United States.
“I told him this. Listen to this. Two hundred years ago, General Lafayette gave Simon Bolivar a medal with the face of George Washington,” said Machado. “Bolivar has since kept that medal for the rest of his life.”
The Nobel Committee, however, clarified that the prize is not transferable and cannot be shared.
Machado was announced as the recipient of the award in October, in recognition of her efforts to advance Venezuelan democracy.
“I dedicate this award to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support for our cause,” Machado wrote on October 10. She secretly left Venezuela, where she had been living in hiding, in December to travel to Norway and collect the medal.
‘Ready to serve’
Machado remains a popular figure within Venezuela’s opposition movement, which has faced oppression and violence under Maduro’s presidency.
Human rights organizations have accused Maduro of systematically suppressing dissent and arresting opposition leaders.
As of January 11, the human rights group Foro Penal estimated that there were 804 political prisoners in Venezuela, although some estimates put their population in the thousands.
Machado was previously a member of Venezuela’s National Assembly, but the Maduro government removed her for allegedly conspiring against the presidency.
She was considered a leading candidate for the 2024 presidential race, and during the October 2023 opposition primary, she gained over 92 percent support.
But in January 2024, she was again disqualified from holding office, and former diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez ultimately led on behalf of the opposition coalition.
After polls closed in July 2024, the government did not publish the usual distribution of votes, leading to widespread outcry about a lack of transparency. The opposition obtained voting results that appeared to show Gonzalez a landslide winner, furthering the outrage.
But Maduro’s government backed his bid for a third six-year term as President.
After the US military kidnapped Maduro from Venezuela on January 3, it transported him to the United States to face narcotics-trafficking charges.
Since then Machado has appeared on American television to advance the claim of the Venezuelan opposition that it has a “mandate” to take over the presidency after the removal of Maduro.
“We have an elected president who is Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, and we are ready and willing to serve our people as we have been mandated,” she told CBS News on January 7.
Fire Machado?
But Trump threw his support behind Rodriguez, who he described as cooperative.
“She’s someone we’ve worked with very well,” Trump said at a news conference on Thursday. “I think we are getting along very well with Venezuela.”
The American President previously said that the United States will “rule” Venezuela. Last week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also told reporters that the decisions of the Venezuelan government will continue to be dictated by the United States of America.
However, Rodriguez denounced the January 3 attack on Venezuela as a violation of international law, and in Thursday’s state of the union speech, she continued to express continued loyalty to “Chavismo,” the political movement that has followed Maduro.
She also criticized the US threats to her country’s sovereignty.
“We know that the United States is a lethal nuclear power. We have seen their record in the history of humanity. We know and we are not afraid to face them diplomatically through political dialogue as appropriate and resolve once and for all this historical contradiction,” said Rodriguez on Thursday.
“Brothers, deputies, regardless of political affiliation, it doesn’t matter. We must go together as Venezuelans to defend our sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity, and also defend our dignity and our honor.”
However it indicated that it planned to revise Venezuela’s hydrocarbons law to allow greater foreign investment.
Renata Segura, the director of the Latin America and Caribbean program at the non-profit International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera that Rodriguez and her government have consistently maintained that Maduro remains the legitimate leader of Venezuela.
“We must not forget that Rodriguez and many other members of the government in Caracas were very adamant about the fact that the intervention against Maduro was illegitimate. In fact they asked for his release,” said Segura.
“So they haven’t made a 180-degree change in the tone of their statements. But it’s not like they have a lot of room to maneuver. So they’re really trying to appease Trump at this point.”
However, Trump has been dismissing the prospects of Machado as a replacement for Maduro or Rodriguez, and on January 3 he said that she “does not have the support or the respect inside the country”.
Segura believes that the choice of the Trump administration to reject Machado as the leader of Venezuela is understandable, in the name of stability.
But, she added, Machado is the clear leader of the opposition, and her coalition therefore needs to be part of the country’s government moving forward.
“It would be very illegitimate if we had a conversation between the Chavismo regime, now without Maduro, and the Trump administration, without those people who really represent the feelings of the Venezuelan people,” said Segura.