By Alexander Villegas
BOGOTA (Reuters) -Mariluz Palma, the head of Maria Corina Machado’s Vente Venezuela political movement in Colombia, does not sleep much these days. She says she was up before dawn on Friday, browsing social media, when she saw the news that Machado had won the Nobel Peace Prize.
“I was filled with tears, filled with strength to keep calling on all Venezuelans, to keep fighting for Venezuela’s freedom,” Palma told Reuters, adding that Venezuelans would be gathering on Sunday in Bogota to celebrate Machado’s win.
“Maria Corina deserves this prize and every prize she can get because she’s a woman who risked her life, businesses, family, everything for millions of Venezuelans,” Palma said.
Palma, 48, has spent the last five years as the national director of Vente Venezuela in Colombia, one among nearly 3 million Venezuelans who are living in the neighboring country after fleeing economic and social collapse at home.
Alejandro Mendez, another of the Venezuelan diaspora in Colombia, said the prize “feels like a vindication of the struggle we’ve been carrying out, for liberation, the recovery of democracy and a change of government in Venezuela.”
Popular opposition figure Machado was barred from running in Venezuela’s 2024 election and threw her support behind the now-exiled Edmundo Gonzalez. President Nicolas Maduro, in power since 2013, claimed he won the election but the opposition and independent election monitors say Gonzalez won in a landslide.
Machado has been in hiding in Venezuela since last year.
“(Machado) is sort of the president in exile, despite not being a president and despite not being in exile,” said Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez, a lecturer at the Kellogg School of Management who specializes in Venezuela.
He added that the Peace Prize will cement her role as the leader of Venezuela’s opposition, despite her holding no formal title.
As well as strengthening Machado’s position and thrusting her back into the spotlight, Lansberg-Rodriguez says the award’s prestige and global consensus will deepen Maduro’s international isolation and widen fissures within his government.
“The Venezuelan government is more rattled than I’ve ever seen it,” Lansberg-Rodriguez said, citing recent U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats in the southern Caribbean as well as internal divisions.
He added that the scope of the prize could also reach people within Venezuela who don’t always have access to unfiltered information.
“In a country like Venezuela, where you have very little free media, but you have a lot of social networking, I think (it) will dig much deeper,” he said. “I think that it’s just so unusual for a country like Venezuela that it’s going to permeate.”
The Maduro government has so far made no public comment on the prize.
Christopher Sabatini, senior research fellow for Latin America at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said the award could re-energize citizens demoralized by the 2024 election and ensuing crackdown on protests.
“While this is a much-needed recognition of the situation in Venezuela, the question now will be how the Maduro government and the international community reacts,” Sabatini said.
(Reporting by Alexander Villegas in Bogota; Additional reporting by Reuters TV and Gwladys Fouche in Oslo; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
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