Venezuela’s opposition leader blocked 3 times from returning to country

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was blocked from returning to her country three times over a 24-hour timeframe on Tuesday.

“She has attempted to enter the country by air and sea but has been turned away each time,” adviser David Smolansky told The Hill .

Machado, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, left the country under the protection of a U.S. rescue team last December. She appeared in public for the first time in 11 months in Oslo, Norway, hours after her daughter accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on her mother’s behalf.

Machado attempted to return home after 7.5- and 7.2-magnitude earthquakes hit several Venezuelan states, including the capital city of Caracas, in June. President Trump discouraged her from going amid developing relations with Venezuelan interim President Delcy Rodríguez. Machado accused the Venezuelan government of preventing her return.

The opposition leader worked to certify Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election results to prove that fellow opposition leader Edmundo González won against President Nicolás Maduro amid allegations of widespread election fraud. The ensuing crackdown prompted Machado to go into hiding.

Machado has vowed to return to her country and run for president if her country holds elections before the end of 2026, after U.S. forces captured Maduro in early January. She told other opposition leaders in Panama that they remain committed to Venezuela’s transition of power and to holding free and fair elections.

“I will be president when the time comes. But it doesn’t matter. That should be decided in elections by the Venezuelan people,” Machado said in an interview with CBS News’s “Face the Nation” in February.

Trump has praised Rodríguez, saying she wants to “make Venezuela great again.” But Republican lawmakers have opposed the interim leader, with Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) calling Rodríguez a “necessary evil.”

The U.S. and Venezuela reached a major oil deal , one that Trump described as “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!” Rodríguez granted a joint venture between the U.S. government and North American Blue Energy Partners, a private company that is Venezuela’s second-largest private oil producer, with 100-year “concessions” for oil fields containing 65 billion barrels of proven reserves, about 21 percent of Venezuela’s total estimated oil.

As part of the deal, the Trump administration said that the U.S. will get the right to purchase 20 percent of the oil that North American Blue Energy Partners unearths at the cost of production. This oil will go toward the U.S.’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which has seen its stockpile diminish in response to the Russia-Ukraine war and the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran.