Venezuela‘s opposition leader María Corina Machado said she believes Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro‘s government is “weaker than ever,” touting the Trump administration‘s strategy with the South American country.
Machado, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient, escaped from her home country to Oslo, Norway, where the prize ceremony was held on Wednesday. Her award comes as President Donald Trump has been increasing pressure on Maduro’s regime by striking down suspected drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean throughout the fall, seizing an oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast, and placing sanctions on his extended family.
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“Maduro is weaker than ever. The armed forces, police are certainly divided and fractured, and our country is united, cohesive, and we finally have the administration, in this case, President Trump, with a clear strategy that truly represents a credible threat for the regime,” Machado said. “If we had ever had a chance to finally move ahead into towards democracy in our country, it’s today.”
Machado made the comments during an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday morning. She said members of the military are fearful of persecution.
“We’ve seen more and more members of the military finding ways to connect with us, to send messages to show that they are feeling the same of what the rest of the country is feeling,” Machado said.
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Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), who also appeared on the Sunday morning program, called Machado a “hero” who “deserves to win the Nobel Prize.”
Following the United States’s Wednesday seizure of an oil tanker that Attorney General Pam Bondi said was shipping oil from Venezuela and Iran as part of “an illicit oil shipping network,” the U.S. followed up with sanctions aimed at Venezuela. The Treasury Department announced sanctions against six companies shipping Venezuelan oil and several of Maduro’s family members.