Machado returns to Venezuela after nearly a year in exile

Caracas — Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado returned home on Sunday after nearly a year in exile, landing in a country whose politics — and its oil — are now tightly bound to Washington. "I'm here. With you all," the Nobel Peace Prize winner wrote on social media.

Machado appeared at a church in western Lara state, where bystanders sang the national anthem and shouted "liberty!" as she left in an SUV, a Reuters witness told the South China Morning Post. Her team said she would travel on to Caracas by road. Edmundo Gonzalez, the opposition's current leader, confirmed the news: "our leader, my dear Maria Corina, is on Venezuelan soil", Al Jazeera reported.

The return has been months in the making. Machado's team said she made seven failed attempts to enter the country in the space of a few weeks in September. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio credited "U.S. supported reconciliation talks" for the safe return, saying they had already freed hundreds of political prisoners and brought hundreds of opposition figures home. Donald Trump, asked about it on Sunday, said he knew nothing about it but called her "a very nice woman", adding: "She gave me her Nobel Prize, so how can I say anything else?"

The economics explain the awkwardness. Since the US military removed president Nicolas Maduro from Caracas in January, acting president Delcy Rodríguez has governed with Trump's endorsement — and signed a deal granting the US control of over 65 billion barrels' worth of Venezuela's oil reserves, according to Al Jazeera. Machado has courted Trump as an ally, even presenting him with her Nobel medal at the White House. But Trump has publicly doubted her, claiming in January she "doesn't have the support within or the respect within the country". Her arrival is unlikely to please Rodríguez.

Rodríguez has governed far beyond the 90 days she was authorised to serve after Maduro's removal, and has yet to call the election she promised at the UN General Assembly in September. Washington maintains the country is not ready. Thousands of Venezuelans marched this week demanding a vote — the first nationwide opposition protest in nearly two years.

The test now is whether Rodríguez sets an election date. Machado's presence on Venezuelan soil, days after the largest opposition mobilisation in two years, raises the political cost of delay — and puts the oil deal's future, and who signs the next one, squarely in play.