The Norwegian Nobel Committee reached a new low on Oct. 10, selecting Venezuelan reactionary politician Maria Corina Machado for its Peace Prize. The choice insults all Venezuelans who defend their country’s sovereignty. Worse, it actively promotes the MAGA regime’s war provocations against Venezuela’s people.

This editorial will outline Machado’s political biography and list a few of her most egregious crimes. 

Machado is an ultraright Venezuelan politician who comes from and represents the discredited Venezuelan oligarchy. She even counts nobility among her ancestors. She dedicated her peace prize to Donald Trump.

Machado is despised by the great majority of Venezuelans and flattered by the representatives of U.S. and European Union imperialist powers. She has promoted violent coups against Venezuela’s elected governments and the imperialist theft of Venezuela’s resources and wealth.

Since the 1998 election when Hugo Chávez first won the presidency, Machado has spoken for the most reactionary and violent wing of the opposition to Chávez’s Bolivarian revolutionary process. She has publicly defended and privately plotted every criminal step U.S. and European imperialism have taken to rob from the Venezuelan people and make them suffer. These steps include:

April 2002. Machado supported the coup against Chávez. A section of the Venezuelan military working with reactionaries in the oligarchy that had the assistance of the George W. Bush regime in the U.S. took Chávez captive. Machado was one of 400 people who signed the Constitution of the Government of Democratic Transition and National Unity, better known as the “Carmona Decree,” a maneuver in parliament aimed at overthrowing Chávez.

A popular uprising demanded Chávez be freed and a group of patriotic officers rescued him and reversed the coup. Coup plotters were purged from the military.

February 2014. Weeks after Chávez died in early 2013, Nicolás Maduro was elected as his successor. On Feb. 12, 2014, Machado joined the leader of Voluntad Popular, Leopoldo López, in a violent plan called La Salida. This group organized attacks that led to the murders of 43 citizens and members of the Chavista security forces throughout the country.

These attacks, called guarimbas, were defeated by Maduro’s Bolivarian government and by popular mobilizations. That was despite President Barack Obama’s labeling Venezuela as a national security threat to the United States in 2015. After the guarimbas offensives failed, the U.S. under the first Trump administration tried a new tactic.

January 2019. Trump backed Juan Guaidó, a minor Venezuelan politician, who appointed himself Venezuela’s president early in 2019. Machado supported Guaidó. Throughout 2019 Venezuela’s wealthiest and most reactionary forces attempted to hold rallies aimed at sparking a coup. Reactionary regimes in neighboring Colombia and Brazil backed the coup attempts. All of these failed. 

During that year, Machado became an “ambassador” in Guaidó’s fake regime and (1) pushed for unilaterally coercive measures (also called “sanctions”) by the U.S. and (2) encouraged the theft of Venezuela’s gold reserves and of Citgo, an oil company that had been owned by Venezuela. These cost the Venezuelan people hundreds of billions of dollars and cut short hundreds of thousands of lives. 

Guaidó proved to be incompetent as a politician, unpopular and corrupt. In the end, his own party rejected his leadership.

Machado has also supported the current Israeli genocidal regime and promised to move Venezuela’s embassy to Jerusalem (Al-Quds) from Tel Aviv should her party be in power. 

What makes this year’s Nobel award an even greater crime is its timing: Using the “war on drugs” pretext, Trump has sent warships into the southern Caribbean and warplanes to U.S. bases in Puerto Rico. U.S. forces have gratuitously murdered Venezuelans and Colombians in boats. They threaten a direct assault on Venezuela. By awarding a “peace prize” to the reactionary, pro-imperialist, criminal Machado, the Nobel Committee has facilitated aggressive war.

Expose the complicity of the Nobel Committee in war crimes! Mobilize to stop U.S. attacks on Venezuela!