#  Tuesday Seminar Series: Maria Corina Machado 

 



    ![MCM](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2025-11/MCM%20PHOTO%5B14%5D.JPG?itok=EE0nfXWX) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **November 25, 2025** 

 12:00PM - 01:00PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **CGIS South, Room S216**  

1730 Cambridge St Cambridge, MA 02138 United States

 

 

 [ Register Here arrow\_circle\_right ](https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dslNGWXtRxWTMnQAqZxKdw) 

 



 

Join us for a timely conversation with Venezuela’s opposition leader and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize recipient **María Corina Machado** on the ongoing struggle for democracy in Venezuela and the prospects for a democratic transition.

Moderated by **Steven Levitsky**, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.

Interpretation to Spanish will be available on Zoom

**About the Speaker**

**María Corina Machado** is the leader of Venezuela’s democratic movement and a key advocate for freedom in Latin America. Her leadership has galvanized millions of Venezuelans demanding fundamental change. In October 2023, she won the opposition primaries with a historic 92% of the vote, uniting a broad coalition behind her vision for democratic transformation grounded in truth, individual liberty, and the reconstruction of a nation where the state is at the service of its people. Despite being arbitrarily disqualified by the Nicolás Maduro regime from participating in the 2024 presidential elections, Machado led the national campaign for Edmundo González Urrutia, who obtained nearly 70% of the vote.

In 2025, María Corina Machado received the Nobel Peace Prize for leading Venezuela’s peaceful democratic movement and uniting the country around the yearning to live with dignity, freedom, and respect through free and fair elections. Her leadership turned a nation’s struggle for survival into a civic movement for truth, culminating in an unprecedented citizen effort to defend and make public the true results of Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election. The Norwegian Nobel Committee hailed her as “one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times.”

Machado is the founder and national coordinator of VENTE Venezuela, a classical liberal party that advocates for individual liberty, the rule of law, and market economy. In 2002, she co-founded Súmate, the country’s leading citizen electoral watchdog, which famously collected 3.5 million signatures in a single day to trigger a recall referendum against then-president Hugo Chávez, an act that made Machado a primary target of political persecution.

In 2010, she was elected to the National Assembly with the highest vote count in Venezuelan parliamentary history. In 2014, she was illegally stripped of her seat after denouncing human rights violations before the Organization of American States. Since then, she has been subject to a barrage of threats, a travel ban for over 11 years, and unfounded accusations of treason and terrorism.

In addition to the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, she is also the recipient of numerous awards, including the Sakharov Prize (2024), the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize (2024), the McCain Institute’s Courage & Leadership Award (2025), Freedom House’s Annual Award (2025), the Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Social Courage (2025), and others across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. She was included on the TIME 100 list (2025) and BBC’s 100 Women List (2018).

Machado holds a degree in Industrial Engineering from UCAB, in Caracas Venezuela, studied Finance at IESA, and is a Yale World Fellow. She has taught at UCAB, served on the board of one of Venezuela’s largest steel firms, and founded two civil society organizations focused on youth opportunity.

**About the Moderator**

**Steven Levitsky** is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government, Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is also a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation. His research focuses on democracy and authoritarianism, political parties, weak and informal institutions, and most recently, the crisis of democracy in the United States. He and Daniel Ziblatt are authors of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times best-seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. Levitsky has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022). He and Lucan Way are currently writing a book on the sources of global democratic resilience in the 21st Century.

  
***This event is presented in collaboration with the*** [***Weatherhead Center for International Affairs***](https://wcfia.harvard.edu/)***.***



 

 



 

 

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