Your Royal Highnesses,
Esteemed laureate,
Excellencies,
Distinguished guests,
Ladies and gentlemen,Samantha Sofia Hernandez, a girl of 16, was brutally abducted last month by masked members of the Maduro regime’s security forces. She was taken from the home of her grandparents. Where she is now, we don’t know – probably in one of the dictatorship’s detention centres. She may be with her father, who disappeared without a trace in January.What had they done wrong?Her brother was a soldier, but refused to follow the regime’s orders to commit brutal acts against the population.For that offence, the entire family must be punished.Juan Requesens is ordered to turn slowly towards the camera. The video shows him standing with a dazed look, as if in a fog, wearing underwear stained with excrement. He had supposedly confessed to planning a coup. But of course, there was no proof. The day before his arrest, Juan had stood before the National Assembly. He gave a speech in which he repeated one key sentence, a promise to his country and to himself: “I refuse to give up.”Alfredo Diaz, an opposition leader and former mayor, was pulled from a bus last November and thrown into the depths of El Helicoide, Latin America’s largest torture chamber. One more political prisoner, in a long line of others. This week came the news of his death. Another life gone. Another victim of the regime.These stories are not unique. This is Venezuela today. It is how the Venezuelan regime treats its own people. A sister. A student. A politician. Anyone who still believes in stating the truth out loud may disappear violently into a system built specifically to eradicate this belief.Samantha, Juan and Alfredo were not extremists. They were ordinary Venezuelans dreaming of freedom, democracy and rights.For this, their lives were stolen from them.Under this regime, children are not spared. More than 200 children were arrested after the election in 2024. The United Nations documented their experiences as follows:Plastic bags pulled tight over their heads.Electric shocks to the genitals.Blows to the body so brutal that it hurt to breathe.Sexualised violence.Cells so cold as to cause intense shivering.Foul drinking water, teeming with insects.Screams that no one came to stop.One child lay in the dark whispering his mother’s name, over and over, in the hope she would not believe he was dead.A 16-year-old boy eventually came home, so ravaged by electric shocks and beatings that he could not hug his mother without pain shooting through his body. For months he jumped at every sound and barely slept. At night he would wake with a jolt – convinced the soldiers were back, to resume their attacks.As we sit here in Oslo City Hall, innocent people are locked away in dark cells in Venezuela. They cannot hear the speeches given today – only the screams of prisoners being tortured.This is how authoritarian powers try to crush those who stand up for democracy.The United Nations has declared these acts to be crimes against humanity.This is the regime of Nicolas Maduro.Venezuela has evolved into a brutal, authoritarian state facing a deep humanitarian and economic crisis. Meanwhile, a small elite at the top – shielded by political power, weapons and legal impunity – enriches itself.In the shadow of this crisis, thousands of women and children are forced into prostitution and human trafficking. Daughters simply disappear. Children become objects of trade in the hands of criminals who see human desperation as a business opportunity.A quarter of the population has already fled the country – one of the world’s largest refugee crises.Those who remain live under a regime that systematically silences, harasses and attacks the opposition.Venezuela is not alone in this darkness. The world is on the wrong track. The authoritarians are gaining.We must ask the inconvenient question:Why is it so hard for us to preserve democracy – a form of government that was conceived to protect our freedom and peace?When democracy loses, the result is more conflict, more violence, more war.In 2024, more elections were held than in any previous year – but ever fewer are free and fair. The power of the law is misused. Independent media are silenced. Critics are imprisoned.More and more countries, including those with long democratic traditions, are drifting towards authoritarianism and militarism.Authoritarian regimes learn from each other. They share technology and propaganda systems. Behind Maduro stand Cuba, Russia, Iran, China and Hezbollah – providing weapons, surveillance and economic lifelines. They make the regime more robust, and more brutal.And yet – amid this darkness – we find Venezuelans who have refused to give up. Those who keep the flame of democracy alive. Who never yield despite the enormous personal cost. They remind us continually of what is at stake.Many of them are with us today:Venezuela’s president elect, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia.Carlos, the poet.Claudia, the activist.Pedro, the university professor.Ana Luisa, the nurse.Corina, the grandmother.Antonio, the opposition politician.Maria Corina, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.At the heart of the battle for democracy shines a simple truth: Democracy is more than a form of government. It is also the basis for lasting peace.Millions of Venezuelans know this.Year after year, students, trade unions, journalists, business groups and ordinary citizens have mobilised in waves of resistance.They have filled the streets in protest. When their votes were taken away, they banged pots and pans. When state surveillance is inescapable, they whisper.People across the political spectrum – from communists to conservatives – have risen to challenge the regime. The opposition has tried one strategy after another.Through it all, they have said: We strive not for revenge, but for justice. For the sanctity of the ballot box. For democracy. For peace.But they are told, in reply, that those things are impossible. That they will fail.And when the Venezuelans asked the world to pay attention – we turned away.As they lost their rights, their food, their health and safety – and eventually their own futures – much of the world stuck to old narratives. Some insisted Venezuela was an ideal egalitarian society. Others wanted only to see a struggle against imperialism. Still others chose to interpret Venezuelan reality as a contest between superpowers, overlooking the bravery of those who seek freedom in their own country. What all these observers have in common is this: the moral betrayal of those who actually live under this brutal regime.If you only support people who share your political views, you have understood neither freedom nor democracy. Yet many critics stop there. They see local democratic forces cooperating, by necessity, with actors they dislike – and use that to justify withholding support. This puts ideological conviction ahead of human solidarity.How should we regard those who use all their energy finding fault with the hard choices that brave defenders of democracy have had to make – instead of recognising their courage and their sacrifice, or asking how we, too, can help fight dictatorship?It is easy to stand on principle when someone else’s freedom is at stake. But no democracy movement operates in ideal circumstances. Activist leaders must confront and resolve dilemmas that we onlookers are free to ignore. People living under dictatorship often have to choose between the difficult and the impossible. Yet many of us – from a safe distance – expect Venezuela’s democratic leaders to pursue their aims with a moral purity their opponents never display. This is unrealistic. It is unfair. And it shows ignorance of history.Many who have stood at this podium to receive the Nobel Peace Prize – including Lech Walesa and Nelson Mandela – knew well the dilemmas of dialogue.In authoritarian systems, dialogue can lead to improvement – but it can also be a trap. Dialogue is often used to buy time, create division and control the agenda. Maria Corina Machado has participated in dialogue processes for years. She has never rejected the principle of talking to the other side – but she has dismissed empty processes.Peace without justice is not peace.Dialogue without truth is not reconciliation.Venezuela’s future can take many forms. But the present is one thing only – and it is horrific.This is why the democratic opposition in Venezuela must have our support – not our indifference, or worse, condemnation. Every day, its leaders must choose a path that is in fact open to them, not the path of wishful thinking.Support for democratic development is support for peace.But since the announcement of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, the question has been posed: Does democracy really lead to peace?The research findings are crystal clear, and the answer is yes. Not because democracy is perfect, but because the mechanisms of democracy make war less likely.Democracies are equipped with safety valves: free media, power-sharing structures, independent courts, civil society organisations and elections that make it possible to change leadership without violence. In this political environment, differing opinions are not a threat to be put down, but an advantage.In a democracy, a leader who ignores facts can be replaced in the next election. In an authoritarian regime, the leader stays in power – and replaces all who tell uncomfortable truths. Loyalty takes the place of reality, and dangerous decisions are taken in the dark. War is always costly – but in authoritarian regimes, it is not the leaders who pay the highest price. This is why democracies almost never go to war with each other, as authoritarian states are more prone to do.Nicolas Maduro’s rule in Venezuela shows why. Conflicts are resolved with brute force, not negotiation. The result is a society where millions are forced into silence, with consequences that do not stop at the border. Instability, violence and systematic destruction of the country’s institutions have affected the entire region, and a neighbouring country has been threatened with military invasion. Venezuela demonstrates – with painful clarity – that authoritarian rule both destroys society from within and spreads instability abroad.Democracy is obviously no guarantee of peace, but it is the most effective system we have to prevent violence and conflict.This line of reasoning often prompts a well-known counterargument: that democracy itself causes unrest and conflict – that demanding freedom is dangerous. This is an old claim. Authoritarian leaders have used it for generations to defend their positions of power. Today they supercharge the argument with disinformation and propaganda – two of their essential weapons.Ladies and gentlemen,As citizens in a democracy we have a duty to be critical of information sources. Alarm bells should ring when the views we express are identical to those disseminated by one of the world’s most manipulative disinformation systems. For in that case, we are not just spreading information, we are spreading the strategic propaganda of a dictator.What are we all to think when we read that it is the Venezuelan opposition that’s threatening the country with war – that the democratic movement desires an invasion? When the narrative is turned upside down, and the victims are branded aggressors? This is the version of reality the Maduro regime tells the world: that it is the guarantor of peace. But peace based on fear, silence and torture – is no peace. It is submission, depicted as stability.No, the source of the violence is not democracy activists. It is those at the top who refuse to cede power. It was not Nelson Mandela who made South Africa violent, but the apartheid regime’s crackdown on demands for equality. Opposition groups did not start the imprisonments in Belarus, the executions in Iran – or the persecution in Venezuela. The violence comes from authoritarian regimes, as they lash out against popular calls for change.Peace and democracy cannot be separated without draining both of meaning. Lasting peace depends on the rule of law, political participation and respect for human dignity.Before we can discuss our political disagreements, we must establish some form of democracy. Without it, there is no meaningful distinction between right and left, no way to legitimately disagree, no genuine politics.Democracy is not an expendable luxury.It is not an ornament to put on a shelf.Democracy is hard work.It is action and negotiation.It is a living obligation.The instruments of democracy are the instruments of peace.We gather today, therefore, to defend something far more important than either side of a political or ideological divide. We gather to defend democracy itself – the very foundation on which lasting peace rests.When people refuse to surrender democracy, they refuse to surrender peace. One who understands this is Maria Corina Machado.As a founder of Súmate, an organisation devoted to building democracy, Ms Machado stepped forward to advocate free and fair elections more than two decades ago. As she herself put it: “It was a choice of ballots over bullets.”In political office and in her service to organisations, Ms Machado has spoken out for judicial independence, human rights and popular representation. She has spent years working for the freedom of the Venezuelan people.The presidential election of 2024 was a key factor in the selection of this year’s Peace Prize laureate. Ms Machado was the opposition’s presidential candidate – and the country’s unifying voice of hope. When the regime blocked her candidacy, the movement might have collapsed, but she threw her support behind Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia and the opposition stayed together.The opposition found common ground in the demand for free elections and representative government. This is the very foundation of democracy: our shared willingness to defend the principles of popular rule, even if we disagree on policy. At a time when democracy is under threat around the world, it is more important than ever to defend this common ground.Hundreds of thousands of volunteers mobilised across political divides. They were trained as election observers and used technology in new ways to document each step in the election. Up to a million people stood watch over polling stations around the country. They uploaded vote tallies, photographed records and secured copies before the regime could destroy them. They defended this documentation with their lives, then made sure the world learned the results of the election.This was grassroots mobilisation unlike any that Venezuela, and probably the world, had ever seen. Ordinary citizens from all walks of life carrying out systematic, high-tech documentary work in an atmosphere of threats, surveillance and violence.The efforts of this democracy movement, both before and after the election, were innovative and brave, peaceful and democratic.The opposition received international support when its leaders publicised the vote counts that were collected from the country’s election districts, showing that the opposition had won by a clear margin.But the regime denied it all. It falsified the election results and clung to power – violently.For the past year, Ms Machado has had to live in hiding.Despite serious threats, she has remained in the country – leading the struggle for democracy from within. She has done everything in her power to be able to attend the ceremony here today — a journey in a situation of extreme danger. But she will arrive in Oslo only after the ceremony. Maria Corina Machado and the Venezuelan opposition have lit a flame that no torture, no lie and no fear can extinguish.She is receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.The Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 to Maria Corina Machado.Thank you.Nobel Prize Lecture by Ana Corina Sosa Machado on Behalf of Maria Corina MachadoDelivered on December 10, 2025, at Oslo City Hall.Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, citizens of the world, my dear Venezuelans:I have come here to tell you a story: the story of a people and their long march toward freedom.This march brings me here today as one voice among millions of Venezuelans who rose, once again, to reclaim the destiny that was always theirs.Venezuela was born of audacity, shaped by peoples and cultures intertwined. From Spain we inherited a language, a culture, and a faith that merged with ancestral Indigenous and African roots.In 1811, we wrote the first constitution in the Spanish-speaking world, one of the earliest republican constitutions on Earth, affirming the radical idea that every human being carries a sovereign dignity. This constitution enshrined citizenship, individual rights, religious liberty, and separation of powers.Our ancestors carried liberty on their backs. They crossed an entire continent, from the banks of the Orinoco to the heights of the Potosí, to help give rise to societies of free and equal citizens, out of the conviction that freedom is never whole unless it is shared.From the beginning, we believed something simple and immense: that all human beings are born to be free. That conviction became our national soul.In the twentieth century, the earth opened: in 1922, the Reventón in La Rosa erupted for nine days: a fountain of oil and possibility.In peace, we turned that sudden wealth into an engine for knowledge and imagination.Through the ingenuity of our scientists, we eradicated disease. We built universities of global prestige, museums and concert halls, sent thousands of young Venezuelans abroad through scholarships, trusting that free minds would return as transformation. Our cities glowed with the kinetic art of Cruz-Diez and Soto.We forged steel, aluminum, and hydropower—proof that Venezuela could build anything it dared to envision.Venezuela also became a refuge.We opened our arms to migrants and exiles from every corner of the earth: Spaniards fleeing civil war; Italians and Portuguese escaping poverty and dictatorship; Jews after the Holocaust; Chileans, Argentinians, and Uruguayans escaping military regimes; Cubans escaping communism and families from Colombia, Lebanon and Syria seeking peace.We gave them homes, schools, safety. And they became Venezuelans.This is Venezuela.We built a democracy that became the most stable in Latin America, and freedom unfolded as a creative force.But even the strongest democracy weakens when its citizens forget that freedom is not something we wait for, but something we become.It is a deliberate, personal choice, and the sum of those choices forms the civic ethos that must be renewed every day.The concentration of oil revenues in the State created perverse incentives: it gave the government immense power over society which turned into privilege, patronage, and corruption.My generation was born in a vibrant democracy, and we took it for granted. We assumed freedom was as permanent as the air we breathed. We cherished our rights, but we forgot our duties.I was raised by a father whose life’s work — building, creating, serving — taught me that loving this country meant assuming responsibility for its future.By the time we recognized how fragile our institutions had become, a man who had once led a military coup to overthrow the democracy, was elected president. Many thought charisma could substitute the rule of law.From 1999 onward, the regime dismantled our democracy: violating the Constitution, falsifying our history, corrupting the military, purging independent judges, censoring the press, manipulating elections, persecuting dissent, and ravaging our extraordinary biodiversity.Oil wealth was not used to uplift, but to bind.Washing machines and refrigerators were handed out on national television to families living on dirt floors, not as progress but as spectacle.Apartments meant for social housing were handed to a select few as conditional rewards for obedience.And then came the ruin:Obscene corruption; historic looting. During the regime’s rule, Venezuela received more oil revenue than in the previous century combined. And it was all stolen.Oil money became a tool to purchase loyalty abroad while at home criminal and international terrorist groups fused themselves to the state.The economy collapsed by more than 80%.Poverty surpassed 86%.Nine million Venezuelans were forced to flee.These are not statistics; they are open wounds.Meanwhile, something deeper and more corrosive took place. It was a deliberate method:to divide society by ideology, by race, by origin, by ways of life; pushing Venezuelans to distrust one another, to silence one another, to see enemies in one another. They smothered us, they took us prisoners, they killed us, they forced us into exile.It had been almost three decades of fighting against a brutal dictatorship.And we had tried everything: dialogues betrayed; protests of millions, crushed; elections perverted.Hope collapsed entirely, and belief in any kind of future became impossible. The idea of change seemed either naïve or crazy. Impossible.Yet, from the very depths of that despair, a step that seemed modest, almost procedural, unleashed a force that changed the course of our history.We decided, against all odds, to run a primary election. An unlikely act of rebellion. We chose to trust the people.To rediscover one another, we traveled by road and by dirt path in a country with gasoline shortages, daily blackouts and collapsing communications.Forbidden from advertising, without money or media willing to speak our names, we crossed it armed only with conviction.Word of mouth was our network of hope, and it spread faster than any campaign. Because our desire for freedom was very much alive within us.The forced migration that was meant to fracture us, instead united us around one sacred purpose: to reunite our families in our land. Grandparents confided in me their greatest fear: dying before meeting their grandchildren abroad; little girls, with voices too small for such sorrow, begged me to bring back their mothers and siblings scattered across continents.Our pain fused into one heartbeat: bring our children home, now.In May 2023, during a rally in the small town of Nirgua, a teacher named Carmen came up to me. She told me she had just run into her Jefa de Calle: a regime agent assigned to Carmen’s block who decides, house by house, who receives a monthly food bag and who is punished with hunger.Shocked to see this woman there, Carmen had asked her “Why are you here?”The Jefa de Calle replied: “My only son, who fled to Peru, asked me to be here today. He told me that if you win, he will return home. Tell me what I have to do.”That day, love defeated fear.Two weeks later, we reached Delicias, a tiny village swallowed by Colombian guerrillas and drug traffickers, where not even a chicken can be sold without criminal permission. No candidate had gone there since 1978.As we climbed the mountain, I saw Venezuelan flags waving from every humble home. I naïvely asked if it was a national holiday. Someone whispered: “No. Here the flag stays hidden. Bringing it out is dangerous. Today people raised it to thank you for daring to come. You will leave… but we will remain, identified.”Entire families stood up to the armed groups that ruled their lives. And when we sang the national anthem together, sovereignty returned in a single, fragile, defiant chorus.That day, courage defeated oppression.Our gatherings became intimate encounters of thousands.We embraced, we cried, we prayed.We understood our struggle was much more than electoral.It was ethical: the struggle for truth.Existential: the struggle for life. Spiritual: the struggle for good.With less than a year before the presidential election, we had to unite every democratic force and restore trust in the vote. The primaries became that moment: a self-organized civic effort that built a nationwide citizen network unlike anything Venezuela had ever seen.On October 22, 2023, against all odds, Venezuela awoke.The diaspora, a third of our nation, reclaimed its right to vote.The son who left cast his ballot alongside the mother who stayed.Lines stretched for blocks. Turnout was so overwhelming that ballots ran out. We trusted the people, and they trusted us back.What began as a mechanism to legitimize leadership became the rebirth of a nation’s confidence in itself. That day, I received a mandate: a responsibility that transcended any individual ambition. I felt humbled and profoundly aware of the weight with which I had been entrusted.Threatened by that truth, the regime prohibited me from running for president. It was a harsh blow, but mandates belong to the people.So we set out to find another candidate who could take my place.Edmundo González Urrutia stepped forward: a calm, brave former diplomat. The regime believed he posed no threat.They underestimated the resolve of millions of citizens — a plural, vibrant society that, in all its diversity, found unity in a common purpose. Communities, political parties, unions, students, and civil society stood together and worked as one so that the voice of a nation could be heard.We were three months from Election Day, and almost no one knew his name.But votes were not enough; we had to defend them. For over a year, we had been building the infrastructure to do so:600,000 volunteers across 30,000 polling stations; apps to scan QR codes, digital platforms, diaspora call centers. We deployed scanners, Starlink antennas, and laptops hidden inside fruit trucks to the furthest corners of Venezuela. Technology became a tool for freedom.Secret training sessions were held at dawn in church backrooms, kitchens, and basements, using printed materials moved across Venezuela like contraband.Finally, Election Day arrived on July 28, 2024. Before dawn, lines wrapped around blocks. A quiet, trembling hope filled the air. Our live tracking showed turnout rising across every state and town. And then the electoral tally sheets— the famous actas, the sacred proof of the people’s will—began to appear: first by phone, then WhatsApp, then photographed, then scanned, and finally carried by hand, by mule, even by canoe.They arrived from everywhere, an eruption of truth, because thousands of citizens risked their freedom to protect them.Confronted with our overwhelming victory, the regime issued a desperate order: soldiers were to expel our volunteers from voting centers and block them from receiving the original tally sheets they were legally entitled to.But the soldiers disobeyed.Edmundo González won with 67% of the vote, in every state, city, village.Every single tally sheet told the same story.Within hours, they were digitized and published on a website for the world to see.The dictatorship responded with terror.2,500 people kidnapped, disappeared, tortured.Homes marked.Entire families taken as hostages.Priests, teachers, nurses, students, anyone who shared a tally sheet, hunted down.These are crimes against humanity, documented by the United Nations. State terrorism, deployed to bury the will of the people.Some of the more than 220 children detained after the elections were electrocuted, beaten, and suffocated until they repeated the lie the regime needed, falsely incriminating themselves of being paid by me to protest. Women and girls in prison are right now being forced into sexual slavery, made to endure abuse in exchange for a family visit, a meal, or the chance to bathe.And yet, the Venezuelan people did not surrender.During these past sixteen months in clandestinity, we have built new networks of civic pressure and disciplined disobedience, preparing for Venezuela’s orderly transition to democracy.That is how we reach this day, a day carrying the echo of millions who stand at the threshold of freedom.This prize carries profound meaning; it reminds the world that democracy is essential to peace.And more than anything, what we Venezuelans can offer the world is the lesson forged through this long and difficult journey: that to have democracy, we must be willing to fight for freedom.And freedom is a choice that must be renewed each day, measured by our willingness and our courage to defend it.For this reason, the cause of Venezuela transcends our borders. A people who choose freedom contribute not only to themselves, but to humanity.We attain freedom only when we refuse to turn our backs on ourselves; when we confront the truth directly, no matter how painful; when love for what truly matters in life gives us the strength to persevere and to prevail.Only through that inner alignment — that vital integrity — do we rise to meet our destiny. Only then do we become who we truly are, able to live a life worthy of being lived.Along this march to freedom, we gained profound certainties of the soul — truths that have given our lives a deeper meaning and prepared us to build a great future in peace.Therefore, peace is ultimately an act of love.This love has already set our future in motion.Venezuela will breathe again.We will open prison doors and watch thousands who were unjustly detained step into the warm sun, embraced at last by those who never stopped fighting for them.We will see grandmothers settle children on their laps to tell them stories not of distant forefathers, but of their own parents’ courage.We will see our students debate ideas passionately and without fear, their voices rising freely at last.We will hug again. Fall in love again. Hear our streets fill with laughter and music.All the simple joys the world takes for granted will be ours.My dear Venezuelans, the world has marveled at what we have achieved. And soon it will witness one of the most moving sights of our time: our loved ones coming home — and I will stand again on the Simón Bolívar bridge, where I once cried among the thousands who were leaving, and welcome them back into the luminous life that awaits us.Because in the end, our journey towards freedom has always lived inside us.We are returning to ourselves. We are returning home.Allow me to honor the heroes of this journey:Our political prisoners, the persecuted, their families, and all who defend human rights; those who sheltered us, fed us, and risked everything to protect us; the journalists who refused silence, the artists who carried our voice; my exceptional team, my mentors, my fellow political and social activists; the leaders around the world who joined and defended our cause; my three children, my adored father, my mother, my three sisters, my brave and loving husband, who’ve all supported me throughout my life; and above all, the millions of anonymous Venezuelans who risked their homes, their families, and their lives out of love for our homeland.
Thank you.
ii) Nobel Peace Prize Lecture by Ana Corina Sosa Machadoon behalf of María Corina Machado
Oslo City Hall, 10 December 2025
Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, citizens of the world, my dear Venezuelans:I am here on behalf of my mother, María Corina Machado, who has united millions of Venezuelans in an extraordinary effort that you, our hosts, have honored with a Nobel Peace Prize. But although she has not been able to be here and take part in this ceremony, I must say that my mother never breaks a promise.I have come here to tell you a story: the story of a people and their long march toward freedom.This march brings me here today as one voice among millions of Venezuelans who rose, once again, to reclaim the destiny that was always theirs.Venezuela was born of audacity, shaped by peoples and cultures intertwined. From Spain we inherited a language, a culture, and a faith that merged with ancestral Indigenous and African roots.In 1811, we wrote the first constitution in the Spanish-speaking world, one of the earliest republican constitutions on Earth, affirming the radical idea that every human being carries a sovereign dignity. This constitution enshrined citizenship, individual rights, religious liberty, and separation of powers.Our ancestors carried liberty on their backs. They crossed an entire continent, from the banks of the Orinoco to the heights of Potosí, to help give rise to societies of free and equal citizens, out of the conviction that freedom is never whole unless it is shared.From the beginning, we believed something simple and immense: that all human beings are born to be free. That conviction became our national soul.In the twentieth century, the earth opened: in 1922, the Reventón in La Rosa erupted for nine days: a fountain of oil and possibility.In peace, we turned that sudden wealth into an engine for knowledge and imagination.Through the ingenuity of our scientists, we eradicated disease. We built universities of global prestige, museums and concert halls, sent thousands of young Venezuelans abroad through scholarships, trusting that free minds would return as transformation. Our cities glowed with the kinetic art of Cruz-Díez and Soto.We forged steel, aluminum, and hydropower — proof that Venezuela could build anything it dared to envision.Venezuela also became a refuge.We opened our arms to migrants and exiles from every corner of the earth: Spaniards fleeing civil war; Italians and Portuguese escaping poverty and dictatorship; Jews after the Holocaust; Chileans, Argentinians, and Uruguayans escaping military regimes; Cubans escaping communism and families from Colombia, Lebanon and Syria seeking peace.We gave them homes, schools, safety. And they became Venezuelans.This is Venezuela.We built a democracy that became the most stable in Latin America, and freedom unfolded as a creative force.But even the strongest democracy weakens when its citizens forget that freedom is not something we wait for, but something we become.It is a deliberate, personal choice, and the sum of those choices forms the civic ethos that must be renewed every day.The concentration of oil revenues in the State created perverse incentives: it gave the government immense power over society which turned into privilege, patronage, and corruption.My generation was born in a vibrant democracy, and we took it for granted. We assumed freedom was as permanent as the air we breathed. We cherished our rights, but we forgot our duties.I was raised by a father whose life’s work — building, creating, serving — taught me that loving this country meant assuming responsibility for its future.By the time we recognized how fragile our institutions had become, a man who had once led a military coup to overthrow the democracy was elected president. Many thought charisma could substitute the rule of law.From 1999 onward, the regime dismantled our democracy: violating the Constitution, falsifying our history, corrupting the military, purging independent judges, censoring the press, manipulating elections, persecuting dissent, and ravaging our extraordinary biodiversity.Oil wealth was not used to uplift, but to bind.Washing machines and refrigerators were handed out on national television to families living on dirt floors, not as progress but as spectacle.Apartments meant for social housing were handed to a select few as conditional rewards for obedience.And then came the ruin:Obscene corruption; historic looting. During the regime’s rule, Venezuela received more oil revenue than in the previous century combined. And it was all stolen.Oil money became a tool to purchase loyalty abroad while at home criminal and international terrorist groups fused themselves to the state.The economy collapsed by more than 80%.Poverty surpassed 86%.Nine million Venezuelans were forced to flee.These are not statistics; they are open wounds.Meanwhile, something deeper and more corrosive took place. It was a deliberate method: to divide society by ideology, by race, by origin, by ways of life; pushing Venezuelans to distrust one another, to silence one another, to see enemies in one another. They smothered us, they took us prisoners, they killed us, they forced us into exile.It had been almost three decades of fighting against a brutal dictatorship.And we had tried everything: dialogues betrayed; protests of millions, crushed; elections perverted.Hope collapsed entirely, and belief in any kind of future became impossible. The idea of change seemed either naïve or crazy. Impossible.Yet, from the very depths of that despair, a step that seemed modest, almost procedural, unleashed a force that changed the course of our history.We decided, against all odds, to run a primary election. An unlikely act of rebellion. We chose to trust the people.To rediscover one another, we traveled by road and by dirt path in a country with gasoline shortages, daily blackouts and collapsing communications.Forbidden from advertising, without money or media willing to speak our names, we crossed it armed only with conviction.Word of mouth was our network of hope, and it spread faster than any campaign. Because our desire for freedom was very much alive within us.The forced migration that was meant to fracture us instead united us around one sacred purpose: to reunite our families in our land. Grandparents confided in me their greatest fear: dying before meeting their grandchildren abroad; little girls, with voices too small for such sorrow, begged me to bring back their mothers and siblings scattered across continents.Our pain fused into one heartbeat: bring our children home, now.In May 2023, during a rally in the small town of Nirgua, a teacher named Carmen came up to me. She told me she had just run into her Jefa de Calle: a regime agent assigned to Carmen’s block who decides, house by house, who receives a monthly food bag and who is punished with hunger.Shocked to see this woman there, Carmen had asked her “Why are you here?”The Jefa de Calle replied: “My only son, who fled to Peru, asked me to be here today. He told me that if you win, he will return home. Tell me what I have to do.”That day, love defeated fear.Two weeks later, we reached Delicias, a tiny village swallowed by Colombian guerrillas and drug traffickers, where not even a chicken can be sold without criminal permission. No candidate had gone there since 1978.As we climbed the mountain, I saw Venezuelan flags waving from every humble home. I naïvely asked if it was a national holiday. Someone whispered: “No. Here the flag stays hidden. Bringing it out is dangerous. Today people raised it to thank you for daring to come. You will leave… but we will remain, identified.”Entire families stood up to the armed groups that ruled their lives. And when we sang the national anthem together, sovereignty returned in a single, fragile, defiant chorus.That day, courage defeated oppression.Our gatherings became intimate encounters of thousands.We embraced, we cried, we prayed.We understood our struggle was much more than electoral.It was ethical: the struggle for truth.Existential: the struggle for life. Spiritual: the struggle for good.With less than a year before the presidential election, we had to unite every democratic force and restore trust in the vote. The primaries became that moment: a self-organized civic effort that built a nationwide citizen network unlike anything Venezuela had ever seen.On October 22, 2023, against all odds, Venezuela awoke.The diaspora, a third of our nation, reclaimed its right to vote.The son who left cast his ballot alongside the mother who stayed.Lines stretched for blocks. Turnout was so overwhelming that ballots ran out. We trusted the people, and they trusted us back.What began as a mechanism to legitimize leadership became the rebirth of a nation’s confidence in itself. That day, I received a mandate: a responsibility that transcended any individual ambition. I felt humbled and profoundly aware of the weight with which I had been entrusted.Threatened by that truth, the regime prohibited me from running for president. It was a harsh blow, but mandates belong to the people.So we set out to find another candidate who could take my place.Edmundo González Urrutia stepped forward: a calm, brave former diplomat. The regime believed he posed no threat.They underestimated the resolve of millions of citizens — a plural, vibrant society that, in all its diversity, found unity in a common purpose. Communities, political parties, unions, students, and civil society stood together and worked as one so that the voice of a nation could be heard.We were three months from Election Day, and almost no one knew his name.But votes were not enough; we had to defend them. For over a year, we had been building the infrastructure to do so:600,000 volunteers across 30,000 polling stations; apps to scan QR codes, digital platforms, diaspora call centers. We deployed scanners, Starlink antennas, and laptops hidden inside fruit trucks to the furthest corners of Venezuela. Technology became a tool for freedom.Secret training sessions were held at dawn in church backrooms, kitchens, and basements, using printed materials moved across Venezuela like contraband.Finally, Election Day arrived on July 28, 2024. Before dawn, lines wrapped around blocks. A quiet, trembling hope filled the air. Our live tracking showed turnout rising across every state and town. And then the electoral tally sheets — the famous actas, the sacred proof of the people’s will — began to appear: first by phone, then WhatsApp, then photographed, then scanned, and finally carried by hand, by mule, even by canoe.They arrived from everywhere, an eruption of truth, because thousands of citizens risked their freedom to protect them.Confronted with our overwhelming victory, the regime issued a desperate order: soldiers were to expel our volunteers from voting centers and block them from receiving the original tally sheets they were legally entitled to.But the soldiers disobeyed.Edmundo González won with 67% of the vote, in every state, city, village.Every single tally sheet told the same story.Within hours, they were digitized and published on a website for the world to see.The dictatorship responded with terror.2,500 people kidnapped, disappeared, tortured.Homes marked.Entire families taken as hostages.Priests, teachers, nurses, students, anyone who shared a tally sheet, hunted down.These are crimes against humanity, documented by the United Nations. State terrorism, deployed to bury the will of the people.Some of the more than 220 children detained after the elections were electrocuted, beaten, and suffocated until they repeated the lie the regime needed, falsely incriminating themselves of being paid by me to protest. Women and girls in prison are right now being forced into sexual slavery, made to endure abuse in exchange for a family visit, a meal, or the chance to bathe.And yet, the Venezuelan people did not surrender.During these past sixteen months in clandestinity, we have built new networks of civic pressure and disciplined disobedience, preparing for Venezuela’s orderly transition to democracy.That is how we reach this day, a day carrying the echo of millions who stand at the threshold of freedom.This prize carries profound meaning; it reminds the world that democracy is essential to peace.And more than anything, what we Venezuelans can offer the world is the lesson forged through this long and difficult journey: that to have democracy, we must be willing to fight for freedom.And freedom is a choice that must be renewed each day, measured by our willingness and our courage to defend it.For this reason, the cause of Venezuela transcends our borders. A people who choose freedom contribute not only to themselves, but to humanity.We attain freedom only when we refuse to turn our backs on ourselves; when we confront the truth directly, no matter how painful; when love for what truly matters in life gives us the strength to persevere and to prevail.Only through that inner alignment — that vital integrity — do we rise to meet our destiny. Only then do we become who we truly are, able to live a life worthy of being lived.Along this march to freedom, we gained profound certainties of the soul — truths that have given our lives a deeper meaning and prepared us to build a great future in peace.Therefore, peace is ultimately an act of love.This love has already set our future in motion.Venezuela will breathe again.We will open prison doors and watch thousands who were unjustly detained step into the warm sun, embraced at last by those who never stopped fighting for them.We will see grandmothers settle children on their laps to tell them stories not of distant forefathers, but of their own parents’ courage.We will see our students debate ideas passionately and without fear, their voices rising freely at last.We will hug again. Fall in love again. Hear our streets fill with laughter and music.All the simple joys the world takes for granted will be ours.My dear Venezuelans, the world has marveled at what we have achieved. And soon it will witness one of the most moving sights of our time: our loved ones coming home — and I will stand again on the Simón Bolívar bridge, where I once cried among the thousands who were leaving, and welcome them back into the luminous life that awaits us.Because in the end, our journey towards freedom has always lived inside us.We are returning to ourselves. We are returning home.Allow me to honor the heroes of this journey:Our political prisoners, the persecuted, their families, and all who defend human rights; those who sheltered us, fed us, and risked everything to protect us; the journalists who refused silence, the artists who carried our voice; my exceptional team, my mentors, my fellow political and social activists; the leaders around the world who joined and defended our cause; my three children, my adored father, my mother, my three sisters, my brave and loving husband, who’ve all supported me throughout my life; and above all, the millions of anonymous Venezuelans who risked their homes, their families, and their lives out of love for our homeland.
Thank you.
