Nobel Peace Laureate calls for U.S. bombing of her country
Within hours of being named the Nobel Peace Laureate for 2025, María Corina Machado called on President Trump to step up his military and economic campaign against her own country Venezuela. The curriculum vitae of the opposition leader hardly lines up with what one would typically associate with a Peace Maker. Nor would those who nominated her, including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and recent US national security advisor Mike Waltz, both drivers of violent policies towards Venezuela.
“The Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 goes to a brave and committed champion of peace, to a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amidst a growing darkness.” Nobel Committee statement.
Let’s see if María Corina Machado passes that litmus test and is worthy to stand alongside last year's winners, Nihon Hidankyo, representing the Japanese hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “honored for their decades-long commitment to nuclear disarmament and their tireless witness against the horrors of nuclear war".
Machado supports Israel, would move embassy
Machado is a passionate Zionist and supporter of both the State of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu personally. She has not been silent on the genocide; indeed she has actively called for Israel to press ahead, saying Hamas “must be defeated at all costs, whatever form it takes”.
What would Alfred Nobel Say?
If Machado achieves power in Venezuela, amongst her first long-promised acts will be the ending of Venezuela’s support for Palestine and the transfer of the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Machado is a signatory of a cooperation agreement with Israel’s Likud Party.
The smiling face of Washington regime change
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, US’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, called Machado a supporter of anti-Muslim fascism and decried the award as ‘insulting and unacceptable”.
Venezuelan activist Michelle Ellner wrote in the US progressive outlet Code Pink:
“She’s the smiling face of Washington’s regime-change machine, the polished spokesperson for sanctions, privatization, and foreign intervention dressed up as democracy.
“Machado’s politics are steeped in violence. She has called for foreign intervention, even appealing directly to Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Gaza’s annihilation, to help ‘liberate’ Venezuela with bombs under the banner of ‘freedom.’ She has demanded sanctions, that silent form of warfare whose effects – as studies in The Lancet and other journals have shown – have killed more people than war, cutting off medicine, food, and energy to entire populations.”
Legitimizing U.S. escalation against Venezuela
Ellner said she almost laughed at the absurdity of the choice, which I must admit was my own reaction. Yale Professor of History Greg Grandin was similarly shocked.
“It is really a disaster. It's laying the groundwork and justifying greater military escalation.”
What Grandin is referring to is the prize being used by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Trump administration to legitimize escalating violence against Venezuela – an odd outcome for a peace prize. Grandin, author of “America, América: A New History of the New World” says Machado “has consistently represented a more hard line in terms of economics, in terms of US relations. That intransigence has led her to rely on outside powers, notably the United States.
“They didn't give it to Donald Trump, but they have given it to the next best thing as far as Marco Rubio is concerned – if he needs justification to escalate military operations against Venezuela.”
The Iron Lady wins a peace prize?
Rubio has repeatedly referred to Machado as the “Venezuelan Iron Lady” – fair enough, as she bears greater resemblance to Margaret Thatcher than she does to Mother Teresa.
This illogicality brought back graffiti I read on a wall in the 1970s: “Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity”. Yet someone at the Nobel Committee had a brain explosion (fitting as Alfred Nobel invented dynamite) when they settled on Machado as the embodiment of Alfred Nobel's ideal recipient – “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
Machado, a recipient of generous US State Department funding and grants, including from the National Endowment for Democracy (the US's prime soft power instrument of regime change) is praised for her courage in opposing the Maduro government, and in calling out a slide towards authoritarianism. Conservatives could run a sound argument in terms of Machado as an anti-regime figure but it is ludicrous to suggest her hard-ball politics and close alliances with Trump would in any way qualify her for the peace prize. Others see her as an agent of the CIA, an agent of the Monroe Doctrine, and as a mouthpiece for a corrupt elite that wants to drive a violent antidemocratic regime change. She has promised the US that she will privatize the country's oil industry and open the door to US business.
“We're grateful for what Trump is doing for peace,” the Nobel winner told the BBC. Trump’s recent actions include bombing boatloads of Venezuelans and Colombians – a violation of international law – as part of a pressure campaign on the Maduro government. Machado says she told Trump "how grateful the Venezuelan people are for what he's doing, not only in the Americas, but around the world for peace, for freedom, for democracy". The dead and starving of Gaza bear witness to a counter narrative.
Rigged elections or rigged narratives?
Peacemakers aren't normally associated with coup d'etats but Machado most certainly was in 2002 when democratically elected President Hugo Chavez was briefly overthrown. Machado was banned from running for President in 2024 because of her calls for US intervention in overthrowing the government.
Central to both Machado's prize and the US government's regime change operation is the argument that the Maduro government won a “rigged election” in 2024 and is running a narco-trafficking government; charges accepted as virtually gospel in the mainstream media and dismissed as rubbish by some scholars and experts on the country.
Alfred de Zayas, a law professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy who served as a UN Independent Expert on International Order, cautions against the standard Western narrative that the Venezuelan elections “were rigged”. The reality is that the Maduro government, like the Chavez government before it, enjoys popularity with the poor majority of the country. Delegitimizing any elected government opposed to Washington is standard operating procedure by the great power.
Professor Zayas led a UN mission to Venezuela in 2017 and has visited the country a number of times since. He has spoken with NGOs, such as Fundalatin, Grupo Sures, Red Nacional de Derechos Humanos, as well as people from all walks of life, including professors, church leaders and election officials.
“I gradually understood that the media mood in the West was only aiming for regime change and was deliberately distorting the situation in the country,” he said in an article in 2024.
I provide those thoughts not as proof definitive of the legitimacy of the elections but as stimulant to look beyond our tightly curated mainstream media. Maria Machado is Washington’s “guy” and that alone should set off alarm bells.
Michelle Ellner: “Anyone who knows what she stands for knows there’s nothing remotely peaceful about her politics.”
Beati pacifici quoniam filii Dei vocabuntur. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God". Matthew 5:9.
Amen to that.
Eugene Doyle
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