Caracas.- The Venezuelan opposition leader and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, María Corina Machado, thanked U.S. President Donald Trump this Saturday for his actions against “armed groups, criminal organizations, and mafias,” including the Tren de Aragua, whose top leader died the day before in a military operation coordinated by both countries and carried out in a mining region in southeastern Venezuela.
On Friday, Trump announced that the U.S. Southern Command «launched a vigorous, rapid, and lethal attack to successfully execute» Héctor Guerrero, known as ‘Niño Guerrero’, leader of the Venezuelan-origin gang classified as a terrorist organization by Washington. An operation in Bolívar state that Caracas later confirmed.
In a message on the social network X, Machado pointed out that, in recent days, a “dismantling of armed groups, criminal organizations, and mafias that operated with absolute impunity” began in Venezuela, among which she mentioned the Tren de Aragua, and which spread to other nations.
The former presidential candidate asserted that “the human, social, ecological, and economic damage that these criminal groups, which were born under the protection of Chavismo and act in complicity with the tyranny, have caused to Venezuela is immeasurable”.
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However, on January 3rd, when President Nicolás Maduro ended up captured and deposed by U.S. forces in Caracas, what the former deputy described as a “new stage” in the “long march toward Venezuela’s freedom” began, thanks to the decisive action of President Trump and his Administration.
Since then, Machado continued, there have been a series of “milestones that for years seemed unattainable: Maduro’s departure to be held accountable before Justice and the progressive dismantling of alliances and structures with Russia, Iran, China, Cuba, and other factors that contributed to the looting and destruction” of Venezuela.
Progressive changes in Venezuela
At the same time, the opposition leader indicated that the country is “advancing in the recovery of fundamental civil liberties” and, in that sense, pointed out that political prisoners have been released, civic space “is progressively expanding, and Venezuelans can express themselves with greater freedom.”
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Furthermore, the media, civil society, and the citizenry “are beginning to reclaim the spaces taken away over the years,” he stated.
“All these achievements were unthinkable six months ago and, for that, we recognize and thank President Trump and his Administration,” reiterated Machado.
In the Nobel laureate’s view, there is still “a long way to go on this long road to freedom” and every Venezuelan “has an irreplaceable role in this process: to organize in their communities, defend the truth, denounce the presence of criminal structures and actively support the institutions that little by little,” she added, are being recovered.
This Friday, Trump stated that the attack was coordinated with his “friends from Venezuela” with whom he collaborates in an “excellent manner.”
The government of the acting president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, who assumed office after the capture of Maduro, indicated that the operation was carried out with specialized technological support and mechanisms of cooperation and intelligence information exchange between both countries, which re-established relations in March, after seven years of rupture.
