U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stepped forward to counter reports that the Trump administration is working quietly to bar Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado from reentering her country — making those denials not through any formal diplomatic channel, but through spontaneous exchanges with journalists at the margins of diplomatic events in late September 2026.
The clarifications arrive as questions about Washington's real posture toward Machado have grown sharper. She has been living abroad since early December 2025, when she escaped Venezuela through a covert extraction operation involving a nighttime sea crossing to Curaçao, before flying on to Oslo, Norway, to attend the ceremony that recognized her as the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate for her decades-long campaign to restore democratic governance to Venezuela.
