President Donald Trump did not win the Nobel Peace Prize that he so publicly coveted. But he pocketed a big prize nonetheless. The prize is Venezuela.
On October 10, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
The committee praised her for “promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” Declaring that “democracy is a precondition for lasting peace,” the committee judged that Machado “meets all three criteria stated in Alfred Nobel’s will for the selection of a Peace Prize laureate. […]
Machado did not bring Venezuela’s opposition together. The Nobel committee says that “Machado has been a key, unifying figure in a political opposition that was once deeply divided.” That, Yale University history professor Greg Grandin says, is not true: “Machado is not a unifier, as the committee said. She represents the most intransigent face of the opposition.” Grandin says that Machado has actually “constantly divided… and handicapped the opposition” by advancing a “more hardline” position “when the opposition was trying to come up with a more moderate position that could challenge the socialism of the 21st century that Chávez represented.”
As Tinker Salas told me, “she supported the 2002 coup against a democratically elected president.” Machado was a signatory to the Carmona Decree, which suspended democracy, revoked the constitution, and installed a coup president. Machado’s record shows that it is not democracy she has fought for, but regime change.
In 2015, Machado joined two other opposition leaders in signing a National Transition Agreement, a framework for a new government Venezuelan officials claim was part of a U.S.-backed coup attempt.
Not only has Machado not fought for democracy in Venezuela, she has neither fought for a “peaceful transition to democracy” nor used “the tools of peace.” […]
Tinker Salas also told me that Machado “has endorsed a foreign intervention of the country that would further destabilize not only Venezuela but the region.” Läs artikel