Trump welcomes Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado in closed-door meeting 

Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado has travelled to Washington, DC, to meet with United States President Donald Trump at the White House, following the abduction of her political adversary, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Thursday’s meeting was the first time the two leaders encountered one another face-to-face.

But the visit was an unusually subdued one for Trump, who normally welcomes foreign leaders to the Oval Office for a news conference with reporters.

This time, however, Trump kept his meeting with Machado private, away from clicking camera shutters and shouted questions from 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 address as president coincided with Machado’s arrival at the White House, a fact that could have contributed to the low-key nature of the meeting.

“We are used to seeing the president ushering in the cameras, making comments, talking away,” Al Jazeera correspondent Mike Hanna reported as evening fell in the capital.

“But on this particular occasion, [the meeting] was held behind closed doors. In fact, we haven’t even had a formal readout from the White House of that meeting with Machado.”

Still, Machado struck an upbeat tone as she exited the White House and strolled onto Pennsylvania Avenue, where she was thronged by reporters and supporters seeking selfies.

She and Trump spent only a few hours together in the White House, as they discussed Venezuela’s future over lunch.

Machado confirmed to the media that she followed through with her plans to give Trump her Nobel Peace Prize, an honour the US president has long coveted for himself.

“I presented the president of the United States the medal, the Nobel Peace Prize,” Machado told reporters.

As she offered Trump the prize, Machado said she recounted a historical anecdote, about an interaction between Simon Bolivar – the Venezuelan military officer who helped liberate much of South America from colonial rule – and the Marquis de Lafayette, a Revolutionary War hero in the US.

“I told him this. Listen to this. Two hundred years ago, General Lafayette gave Simon Bolivar a medal with George Washington’s face,” Machado said. “Bolivar since then kept that medal for the rest of his life.”

The Nobel Committee, however, has clarified that the prize is non-transferable and cannot be shared.

Machado was announced as the recipient of the prize in October, in recognition of her efforts to advance Venezuelan democracy.

“I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of 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.

‘Willing to serve’

Machado remains a popular figure within Venezuela’s opposition movement, which has faced oppression and violence under Maduro’s presidency.

Human rights organisations have accused Maduro of systematically suppressing dissent and arresting opposition leaders.

As of January 11, the human rights group Foro Penal estimated there were 804 political prisoners in Venezuela, though some estimates put their population in the thousands.

Machado was formerly a member of Venezuela’s National Assembly, but Maduro’s government had her removed 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 earned more than 92 percent support.

But in January 2024, she was again disqualified from holding office, and former diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez ultimately ran on behalf of the opposition coalition.

After polls closed in July 2024, the government did not publish the usual breakdown of the voting tallies, leading to widespread outcry over a lack of transparency. The opposition obtained voting tallies that appeared to show Gonzalez winning in a landslide, further fuelling the outrage.

But Maduro’s government backed his claim to a third six-year term as president.

After the US military abducted Maduro from Venezuela on January 3, it transported him to the US to face charges of narcotics trafficking.

Machado has since appeared on US television to advance the Venezuelan opposition’s claim that it has a “mandate” to take over the presidency after Maduro’s removal.

“We have a president-elect 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.

Dismissing Machado?

But Trump has thrown his support behind Rodriguez, whom he has described as cooperative.

“ She’s somebody that we’ve worked with very well,” Trump said at a news conference on Thursday. “I think we’re getting along very well with Venezuela.”

The US president has previously said that the US will “run” Venezuela. Last week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also told reporters that the Venezuelan government’s “decisions are going to continue to be dictated by the United States of America”.

Still, Rodriguez has 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 allegiance to “Chavismo”, the political movement Maduro followed.

She has also criticised US threats to her country’s sovereignty.

“We know the US is a lethal nuclear power. We have seen their record in 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,” Rodriguez said on Thursday.

“Brothers and sisters, deputies, regardless of political affiliation, it doesn’t matter. We have to go together as Venezuelans to defend our sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity, and also defend our dignity and our honour.”

She nevertheless indicated she planned to revisit Venezuela’s hydrocarbon law to allow for greater foreign investment.

Renata Segura, the director of the Latin America and Caribbean programme at the nonprofit International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera that Rodriguez and her government have consistently maintained that Maduro remains the rightful leader of Venezuela.

“We should not forget that Rodriguez and many other members of the government in Caracas have been very adamant about the fact that the intervention against Maduro was illegitimate. They’ve actually demanded that he be liberated,” Segura said.

“So they haven’t done a 180-degree shift in the tone of their declarations. But it’s not like they have a lot of manoeuvring room. So they are really trying to appease Trump at this moment.”

Still, Trump has long dismissed Machado’s prospects as a replacement for Maduro or Rodriguez, saying on January 3 that she “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country”.

Segura believes the Trump administration’s choice 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 just had a conversation between the regime of Chavismo, now without Maduro, and the Trump administration, without those people that really represent the Venezuelan people’s feelings,” Segura said.