December 12, 2025
Why did it take a private contractor to get Nobel laureate Maria Corina Machado out of Venezuela alive?
By Monica Showalter
The Wall Street Journal's longtime correspondent, Juan Forero, published two riveting pieces on how this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Corina Machado, managed to escape from the Venezuelan socialist hellhole, an arrest warrant with her name on it having driven her into hiding for more than a year.
His first piece begins this way:
Wearing a wig and a disguise, María Corina Machado began her escape from Venezuela on Monday afternoon. The Venezuelan opposition leader was trying to get to Norway by Wednesday in time to receive the Nobel Peace Prize that she won for challenging Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro.
First she had to get from the Caracas suburb where she had been in hiding for a year to a coastal fishing village, where a skiff awaited her.
Over the course of 10 nerve-racking hours, Machado and two people helping her escape hit 10 military checkpoints, avoiding capture each time, before she reached the coast by midnight, said a person close to the operation.
She rested for a few hours, the person said, before the next leg of her journey: a perilous trip across the open Caribbean Sea to Curaçao. She and her two companions set out on a typical wooden fishing skiff at 5 a.m., the person said, with strong winds and choppy seas slowing them down.
It got worse. Forero's second piece described how her flimsy, beat-up boat, chosen so it would not be mistaken for a go-fast drug boat that the U.S. Navy is looking for, sailed at night into the stormy waters, with ten-foot waves battering it. It ran into extreme distress and almost didn't make it:
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/12/why_did_it_take_a_private_contractor_to_bring_nobel_laureate_maria_corina_machado_out_of_venezuela_alive.html
