Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado said she supports President Trump’s aggressive approach in dealing with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and said she thinks the Venezuelan government’s days are “numbered.”
In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” the Venezuelan opposition leader was asked if she supports the U.S. increasing sanctions on Venezuelan individuals and the U.S. potentially conducting more seizures of vessels, like the oil tanker last week.
“Look, I absolutely support President Trump’s strategy, and we, the Venezuelan people, are very grateful to him and to his administration, because I believe he is a champion of freedom in this hemisphere,” Machado told host Margaret Brennan.
Speaking from Oslo, where she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this year, Machado noted that she previously dedicated, in part, the award to Trump “because I think that he finally has put Venezuela in where it should be, in terms of a priority for the United States national security.”
“And we do support these actions, because, Margaret, we are facing, not a conventional dictatorship. This is a very complex criminal structure that has turned Venezuela into a safe haven of international crime and terrorist activities, starting with Russia, Iran, Cuba, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Colombian guerrilla, the drug cartels operating freely and directed in partnership with Maduro and his regime,” she continued.
Machado has been living in hiding in her own country for nearly a year and was seen in public for the first time this past week in Oslo, where her daughter accepted her peace prize on her behalf.
After winning the opposition primary, Machado was barred from running against Maduro last year and endorsed a lesser-known candidate widely seen as her stand-in. Maduro claimed victory and refused to leave power, but experts broadly dismissed the government’s election data purporting to show Maduro as the winner as “mathematically and statistically” impossible.
Asked if she wants to see more pressure from the U.S., Machado said, “We want every legal action through law enforcement … not only from the United States, also from other Caribbean, Latin American and European countries that further block the illegal activities of the regime.”
“Why? Because we need to increase the cost of staying in power by force. Once you arrive to that point in which the cost of staying in power is higher than the cost of leaving power, the regime will fall apart,” she continued. “And it’s the moment where we, you know, advance into a negotiated transition.”
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