The Nobel Peace prize for 2025 has just been awarded to a fascist. Behind the sanctimonious white dresses and demure femininity, Maria Corina Machado is the ruthless poster girl of imperialist regime change in Venezuela, spokesperson for US interests from Caracas to Khan Younis. As the US deploys warships to Caribbean and launches military strikes on fishing boats, the Nobel Committee showed exactly what they mean by ‘peace’, by awarding the prize to this puppet who openly demands a US invasion of her country.
Even for those unfamiliar with Machado’s role within Venezuela, her open Zionism has generated waves of discontent: Machado signed a cooperation agreement with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal Likud party, demanding their support in regime change, declaring ‘The struggle of Venezuela is the struggle of Israel’. Earlier this year Machado addressed the Patriots for Europe conference in Madrid, calling for the ethnic cleansing of Muslims via a ‘reconquista‘ (reconquest) of Europe alongside far-right figures such as Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orban. She is a cheerleader for genocide. The British bourgeois media gushed at the news, with the Guardian‘s Tom Phillips exalting Machado as Venezuela’s answer to Margaret Thatcher.
Hailing from one of the richest families in Venezuela, Machado has long spearheaded fascist violence and imperialist intervention against the Bolivarian revolutionary process that for 25 years has been fighting to control Venezuela’s oil wealth and channel it into poverty-busting social programmes. Machado is the daughter of steel magnate Henrique Machado Zuloaga, the former CEO of the Sivensa steel company whose subsidiaries were nationalised by late Socialist party (PSUV) President Hugo Chavez in 2010. Aligning herself with the Latin American far-right such as Argentina’s Javier Milei and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Machado has a class interest in sabotaging any project for social justice and the redistribution of wealth in the continent.
During the failed 48-hour coup of 2002 against Chavez; Machado was a signatory of the Carmona Decree which dissolved Venezuela’s elected parliament and ripped up the new constitution produced by the participatory constituent assembly. Whilst Machado and her cronies posed for photos and press conferences, mercenary snipers opened fire on Chavista masses surrounding Miraflores palace killing 19 people.
Machado is well paid for her efforts. In 2004 alone, her ‘civil organisation’ Sumate received over $100,000 from Washington’s National Endowment for Democracy to lead a failed presidential recall referendum. Since then she has been amongst the hand-picked beneficiaries of the approximately $40 million the US congress approves annually for destabilisation in Venezuela. Her signature appears on 2013’s leaked ‘Strategic Venezuelan Plan’ which sought to create shortages of basic goods, amplify social discontent and provoke crisis in the streets which ‘wherever possible should result in deaths and injuries’ – with the aim of provoking US and NATO intervention. Implementing this plan, in 2014 she led a campaign of street violence that saw makeshift roadblocks set up in affluent communities. Steel wire traps were hung above roads to decapitate motorcyclists, snipers shot security forces and Chavista civilians alike and arsonists attacked hospitals and public buildings. 43 people were killed.
That same year captured mercenary Lorent Saleh named Machado in connection with his planned 48-hour killing spree. Though the plot was foiled, PSUV deputy Robert Serra, one of the named targets, was stabbed to death in his apartment. In leaked emails at the time, Machado wrote: ‘make the necessary calls, obtain financing to annihilate [President] Maduro and the rest will fall apart’, boasting that ‘We have a chequebook stronger than the regime’s to break the international security ring’.
In 2017, Machado supported further far-right street violence which saw black Venezuelan Orlando Figuera publicly lynched and burned to death in Caracas on suspicion of being a Chavista. Burning effigies of Cuban medical workers were hung from bridges. In 2018 Machado publicly threatened that, ‘if he [Maduro] wants to save his life, he should understand that his time is up’. A drone attack nearly assassinated President Maduro during a public ceremony the following month. Following 2024’s Presidential election, Machado called for street violence, working hand in glove with a global campaign of misinformation. Gangs of opposition thugs set fire to hospitals, electoral commission buildings, subsidised food distribution centres and pharmacies and targeted socialist politicians and supporters. 25 were left dead. Masked youths under the influence of narcotics confessed to receiving $150 per day for their efforts after being arrested.
Alongside this open violence, Machado has applauded an asphyxiating regime of US-led sanctions against Venezuela, which the UN high commission for Human Rights estimates has killed 100,000 Venezuelans as a result of shortages of medicines and other imports. Today, as Trump authorises US missile attacks on fishing boats in the Caribbean, alleging they are ‘narco-terrorists’, Machado is celebrating these killings declaring ‘this is about saving lives.’ Without a hint of irony, she personally thanked Trump for all he is doing ‘around the world for peace’ stating she accepted the Nobel prize in ‘his honour’.
Machado will join a roll call of imperialist war mongers in receiving this accolade. In 1973 US Secretary of state Henry Kissinger was awarded the prize jointly with Vietnamese workers party representative Le Duc Tho for a peace deal in Vietnam which had already fallen apart. Indignant, Le Duc Tho refused the award, and Kissinger was too busy overseeing the carpet-bombing of Laos and Cambodia to collect it in person. In 2009, Barack Obama accepted the peace prize whilst the US bombed Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; green-lighting ten times as many air strikes in his first year as George W Bush in his entire presidency. In 2012 the entire European Union won the prize despite recent deployments of troops to Congo, Somalia, Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. As the US gears up for a war in the Caribbean, it is time to rename the Nobel peace prize: the Nobel war prize.
