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María Corina Machado and George W. Bush at the White House in 2005 [Photo: White House/Eric Draper]
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded its 2025 Peace Prize to the leader of Venezuela’s far-right opposition, Maria Corina Machado, an event that is as significant as it is sinister.
The award was announced on October 9 in Oslo, Norway, a country whose wealth, strategic role in NATO, and large military investments position it as a bulwark for imperialist interests in Europe and beyond.
The award provides a glaring demonstration of the hypocrisy of capitalist public opinion as it is marshaled behind another catastrophic imperialist intervention in Latin America.
There is nothing unprecedented about bestowing the peace prize upon far-right or blood-drenched figures. If “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,” as American songwriter, satirist and mathematician Tom Lehrer quipped in 1973, the award to Machado hammers another nail into its coffin.
In the years in between, the prize went to mass murderers and war criminals such as Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the former Irgun terrorist responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon, and Aung San Suu Kyi, whose government was responsible for genocidal violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya minority. Barack Obama received the award in 2009, on the eve of launching a major military surge in Afghanistan and as his government was unleashing a wave of drone assassinations. Then as now, the prize served not as a reward to peacemakers, but as a tool for anointing those favored by imperialism and to legitimize war.
The fascist minions of Donald Trump reacted with petty anger over the Norwegian committee’s passing over the US president. The White House issued an initial statement charging that the committee “proved they place politics over peace” in passing over Trump, whom they credited with “the heart of a humanitarian.”
With his record of arming, financing and politically supporting the Gaza genocide and bombing Iranian nuclear facilities, not to mention his murder of unarmed civilians on small boats in the southern Caribbean, Trump was a bit much for even the Nobel committee to swallow. But if they couldn’t give the award to the US organ grinder, they did choose one of his able monkeys in the person of Machado.
Later on Friday, having seemingly resigned himself to the decision, America’s would-be dictator retweeted Corina Machado’s statement in response to the award: “We are on the threshold of victory and today more than ever we count on President Trump…”
The Norwegian Nobel Committee described Machado as “a brave and committed champion of peace… a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness.” Not surprisingly, AI detector ZeroGPT concludes that this blather and much of the rest of the statement were copy-pasted from ChatGPT.
The champion of “free and fair elections” has been a tool of US regime-change operations for nearly a quarter century. In April 2002, she rushed to Caracas’ Miraflores presidential palace to join in the military-big business bid to overthrow Venezuela’s popularly elected president Hugo Chavez, signing the infamous Carmona Decree in support of the coup.
Shortly after, Machado launched her NGO Súmate to organize violent US-backed destabilization efforts paid for by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an agency created to carry out political operations formerly executed by the CIA.
This hero of the struggle for a “peaceful transition to democracy” openly hails US military aggression and is directly collaborating with Washington on plans for post-regime-change repression of all those opposed to Washington’s intervention.
As the New York Times acknowledged last week, “The group supporting the use of force is led by Maria Corina Machado.” The Times adds: “One of Ms. Machado’s advisers, Pedro Urruchurtu, said she was coordinating with the Trump administration and had a plan for the first 100 hours after Mr. Maduro’s fall. That plan involves the participation of international allies, he said, ‘especially the United States.’” One can be certain that those 100 hours would be every bit as bloody as those that followed the coups in Chile in 1973 and Argentina in 1976.
At the very least, the prize to Machado is an endorsement by powerful sections of the European ruling elite of a war for regime change with all its potential for opening a new front in the emerging third world war. France’s embattled “president of the rich,” Emmanuel Macron, as representative of the transatlantic establishment, declared Machado a “fighter for liberation.” What a farce!
In its statement, the Nobel Committee laments a global trend which has seen the “rule of law abused by those in control, free media silenced, critics imprisoned, and societies pushed towards authoritarian rule and militarisation” But it somehow neglects to mention that the foremost example of this trend is Machado’s paymaster and controller, the Trump administration.
Recently, Machado went on Fox News to endorse the ongoing US military buildup in the Caribbean and extrajudicial massacres of fishermen accused without evidence of working for cartels allegedly tied to Maduro.
“I want to tell how grateful we are to President Trump and the administration for addressing the tragedy that Venezuela is going through,” she said. “Maduro has turned Venezuela into the biggest threat to the national security of the US and the stability of the region.”
The Pentagon has now sunk at least five small vessels killing at least 21 civilians in the southern Caribbean, while amassing a significant naval fleet, numerous warplanes and 4,500 sailors and troops off Venezuela’s shores. These are the first recognized US military attacks on Latin America and the largest military deployment there since the 1989 invasion of Panama that left hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians dead to capture the former US ally and dictator Manuel Noriega, also on the pretext of drug charges.
Last week, the White House sent a memo to Congress announcing a “non-international armed conflict” against a secret list of alleged drug cartels in what amounted to an illegal declaration of war against the people of the entire hemisphere, not least the working class at home.
Beyond her support for imperialist intervention, the embrace of Machado’s fascist political pedigree—like the thunderous acclamations given to fascist Argentine president Javier Milei—signifies an endorsement by the “respectable” layers of the world oligarchy of a return in Latin America to the regime of terror created under the US-backed dictatorships that seized power across the region in the latter half of the 20th century.
Alongside figures like Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Argentina’s Milei, Machado is a signatory of the “Madrid Forum” charter launched by the fascistic Spanish party VOX, which along with the AfD in Germany she counts among her closest allies.
Mehring Books
Sounding the Alarm: Socialism Against War
These speeches provide a Marxist analysis of the relentless escalation of imperialist militarism over the past decade.
Machado is a champion of “free market” policies, above all the privatization of the state oil company PDVSA, whose public ownership has been upheld by a wide spectrum of bourgeois parties since the 1970s. She has endorsed Milei’s economic program of “shock therapy” in which “freedom” means the liberation of corporations to eliminate social spending and exploit the working class without any restrictions or regulations.
The scion of a Venezuelan oligarchic dynasty, her far-right politics have always been animated by hatred of the working class and of any challenge to social inequality. On this basis, she has supported crippling US sanctions that by 2020 were estimated to have caused some 100,000 excess deaths, while forcing millions to flee the country. She has likewise remained silent on the punitive anti-immigrant policies pursued by the Trump administration against hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who sought refuge in the US.
Machado has repeatedly appealed to the Venezuelan military as the country’s ultimate political arbiter, making clear that any regime she were to head would take the form of a military dictatorship from day one, committed to crushing opposition to her vastly unpopular economic and social policies.
The question raised most sharply by the Nobel Peace Prize to Machado is which social force and under what program can the threat of fascism and war be stopped.
The bourgeois nationalist governments led by Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela carried out limited nationalizations and social assistance programs and sought better terms from US imperialism.
However, with the aid of their Stalinist, Social Democratic and Pabloite hangers-on, these governments have fostered illusions that sustainable social and democratic gains could be secured for workers and poor peasants and imperialist oppression opposed on the basis of a nationalist program, without overthrowing capitalism.
As in Chile, where the 1973 Pinochet coup overthrew the left-nationalist President Salvador Allende, and in numerous other countries, such illusions have only served to disarm workers politically and physically before the turn by the ruling elites to fascist dictatorship.
It is necessary to cut through the lying propaganda of “democracy” and “human rights” and reveal the ugly reality of bourgeois politics. The working class must reject with contempt the cynical use of the Nobel Prize to sanctify imperialist reaction.
Only the unity of workers in Venezuela, with those of the rest of Latin America, the United States, and internationally—armed with a socialist and revolutionary perspective—can halt the march to world war and fascist dictatorship, and open the way to genuine peace, democracy and social equality.
The anointment of Machado by imperialism is, above all, a warning: the ruling class is preparing for new crimes on a world scale. The answer must be the independent mobilization of the international working class, made conscious of its strength and its historic tasks.
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