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 air strikes 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”.
