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Nobel farce: Maria Corina Machado's award exposes the Prize's hollow core

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National Heraldpublisher-detail-arrow
13th October, 2025 18:47 IST

Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado accepted the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize on 10 October, Saturday, with a statement that rippled across social media and international wires: “This honour belongs to the resilient spirit of Venezuela and to President Trump’s unwavering backing of our democratic aspirations.”

Her declaration was in keeping with a career built on external leverage rather than internal reconciliation. A question lingers: How does a leader whose playbook includes coups, economic sieges and overtures to warmongers embody ‘peace’?

Oslo’s choice casts long shadows over the Nobel’s fading prestige, revealing a selection process entangled in geopolitical favouritism. This award, ostensibly honouring ‘non-violence’, spotlights instead a figure whose actions have fuelled multiple cycles of instability in her home country.

Machado’s political baptism was not by the ballot box, but through the smoke of subversion.

In April 2002, as tanks rolled through Caracas during the short-lived overthrow of President Hugo Chávez, she emerged as a key operative in the opposition’s shadow government. Signing the infamous Carmona Decree, Machado lent her name to a document that suspended the constitution, shuttered the National Assembly and dismantled judicial independence in one fell swoop. Justified as a corrective to electoral excess, it was in fact a blueprint for institutional erasure.

The coup, backed by business elites and US embassy whispers, lasted three days. On 14 April, popular mobilisation restored Chávez.

Machado framed her brief triumph as a spontaneous uprising against tyranny, glossing over the violence that claimed 19 lives and the media blackouts that silenced dissent. Critics, including human rights watchdogs, later documented how opposition factions, with Machado’s vocal support, targeted state media and union leaders.

The big game in Venezuela

This episode set the tone for her career, where democracy was a tool to be wielded and discarded expediently.

In subsequent years, Machado parlayed her coup credentials into a congressional seat, where she railed against land reforms and social programmes as ‘confiscations’, ignoring their role in lifting millions out of poverty. Her disdain for sovereignty produced a willingness to auction national autonomy for international applause.

Sanctions as siege: weaponising want

Few policies define Machado’s influence like her unyielding advocacy for economic sanctions, championed in the US since the Obama era but amplified under Trump. Positioning herself as Venezuela’s expatriate conscience, she lobbied in Washington corridors, testifying before Congress on the virtues of financial isolation. “Targeted measures,” she insisted, would pressure the Maduro regime without collateral damage — a claim belied by mounting evidence.

By 2025, the US sanctions exacted a staggering toll: hyperinflation eroded wages by 99 per cent, blackouts shuttered hospitals, import bans spiked infant mortality rates. Independent analyses, from the Center for Economic and Policy Research to UN rapporteurs, link these strictures to over 40,000 preventable deaths, primarily among the vulnerable.

Machado dismissed such figures as regime propaganda, instead hailing the US measures as “moral clarity” against a “narco-dictatorship”.

Her zeal extended beyond economics. In 2019, amid escalating tensions, Machado had publicly beseeched Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for military assistance, invoking parallels between Venezuelan ‘oppression’ and Palestinian struggles — while sidestepping Israel’s own record of disproportionate force.

This desperate alliance-building invited external firepower into a volatile region, stirring up also a West Asia already scarred by US interventions in Iraq and Libya. And her entreaties found a receptive ear.

As the Trump administration dispatched naval assets to the Caribbean under the cloak of ‘counter-narcotics operations’, Machado praised the manoeuvres as “bold deterrence”. She projected US carriers as ‘liberators’, ready to enforce “democratic norms”.

Such flirtations with invasion raise the ghost of the Monroe Doctrine, risking entanglement in a proxy conflict that could engulf neighbours from Colombia to Brazil.

Guarimbas and the myth of non-violent resistance

Machado’s domestic playbook was even grimmer. In 2014, as economic woes deepened, she co-engineered ‘La Salida’ (the Exit), a multifaceted push to oust Maduro via sustained unrest. What began as calls for electoral reform devolved into ‘guarimbas’ — urban insurgencies featuring motorcycle patrols, Molotov ambushes and sniper fire from opposition strongholds.

Its organisers, with Machado’s endorsement, erected razor-wire barricades and directed operations from social media war rooms. The toll was brutal: 43 deaths, over 3,000 injuries and widespread sabotage of public services. Ambulances were pelted with debris, state nurseries and clinics fell to arson. In one notorious incident, a contingent of foreign aid workers — Cuban doctors on humanitarian rotation — faced attempted immolation by guarimba militants, an assault Machado later recast as “regrettable excesses” in the heat of ‘resistance’.

International observers, from Amnesty International to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, condemned the tactics as asymmetrical warfare. Yet Machado, broadcasting from safe havens abroad, framed the mayhem as a ‘Venezuelan Spring’, drawing parallels to Arab Awakening narratives while eliding the ethnic targeting of Afro-Venezuelan and indigenous Chavistas. Her narrative control — amplified by outlets like CNN en Español — sanitised the violence, portraying victims of state crackdowns while muting opposition culpability.

This pattern persisted in 2017 and 2019 flare-ups, where Machado’s networks funnelled funds from Miami exiles to sustain the strife. Her strategy ended up turning neighbourhoods into no-man’s-lands and eroding trust in electoral paths she now decries as fraudulent.

Neoliberal handmaiden: sovereignty for sale

Machado embodies a fervent neoliberalism, one that views public assets as impediments to progress. Her vision for a post-Maduro Venezuela includes wholesale privatisation of PDVSA oil fields, Orinoco Mining Arc concessions and even communal water systems — echoing the structural adjustments that ravaged Argentina in the 1990s and hollowed out Bolivia’s gas reserves. “Efficiency demands markets,” she argues, promising FDI influxes that historically enrich multinationals while displacing locals.

This agenda dovetails with her extraterritorial loyalties.

A fixture at Republican fundraisers since the Bush years, Machado has cultivated ties from John Bolton to Marco Rubio, positioning herself as Latin America’s anti-Bolivarian bulwark. Her pledge to restore full diplomatic relations with Israel — complete with relocation of the embassy to Jerusalem — signals not just realignment, but ideological kinship with policies that conflate security with expansionism.

In dedicating her Nobel to Trump, Machado tipped her hand: a future administration beholden to MAGA realpolitik, where Venezuelan recovery means resource carve-outs for ExxonMobil and Halliburton.

This isn’t stewardship; it’s subcontracting, trading sovereignty for sanctions relief and campaign optics.

María Corina Machado’s Nobel coronation isn’t a triumph of perseverance; it’s a cautionary indictment of an award adrift. By honouring a figure whose career traffics in division, the committee endorses a worldview where peace is imposed, where ‘democracy’ excuses economic evisceration and ‘freedom’ invites foreign boots.

UN Security Council rejects US, Russian resolutions on Venezuela

True custodians of concord, from Colombian peace accords brokers to Sahrawi negotiators, toil without fanfare, mending what ideologues like Machado tear asunder.

Venezuela, caught in this crossfire, deserves better. As Nicolas Maduro’s grip tightens amid electoral distrust, the risk of Machado’s ascent looms. In Oslo’s halls, the echo of Machado’s thanks to Trump rings hollow — a toast to alliances that breed enmity, not the quiet labour of lasting accord.

Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai. More of his writing may be read here

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