When “Peace” Is a Weapon
The global spotlight now rests on Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado — the newly crowned Nobel Peace Prize laureate for 2025. The world expects the Peace Prize to honour figures who have transcended violence and division to nurture genuine reconciliation. Instead, this year’s award amplifies a sharp contradiction: Machado’s political career, her advocacy for foreign intervention and economic warfare, and her alliances with divisive figures challenge the very notion of peace the Nobel Prize claims to embody.
The Architect of “Regime Change,” Not Reconciliation
Since emerging as a prominent figure in Venezuelan opposition politics, Machado has stood not for compromise or dialogue, but for a project grounded in confrontation, foreign tutelage, and the systematic erosion of Venezuela’s sovereignty. Her record is marked not by bridge-building but by active complicity in attempts to topple elected governments, most infamously through her involvement in the 2002 coup that briefly unseated a democratically chosen president and erased constitutional norms overnight.
More than a fleeting moment, this coup was a blueprint: an extra-constitutional rupture, cheered on by external powers and accelerated by domestic elites like Machado. Her signature on the Carmona Decree, which dissolved every public institution in the country, remains a stark testament to her indifference to democratic continuity.
Champion of Sanctions: “Silent War” on the Venezuelan People
For more than a decade, Machado has paraded herself as the reforming face of a battered nation — but beneath that image lies one of the most zealous architects of US-led sanctions on Venezuela. These are not abstract tools of diplomacy but instruments of collective punishment; even research in leading medical and social journals has correlated broad-based sanctions with higher death rates, malnutrition, medical shortages, and the collapse of basic social infrastructure.
Machado has made explicit appeals in international forums and US capitals, demanding escalated sanctions that would squeeze the country’s poorest, sickest, and most vulnerable. Such measures — severing access to food, medicine, and global markets — have not crippled elites but devastated children, families, and ordinary workers; for Machado, such suffering was tolerable collateral for political change.
Apologist for Foreign Intervention
Far from opposing violence, Machado has actively solicited it. Her repeated calls for “liberation” by force extend from lobbying Washington to directly appealing to militarist leaders abroad, including Benjamin Netanyahu — the architect of destructive campaigns in the Middle East — to bring bombs, not ballots, to Venezuela’s transition. The dangerous implications are undeniable: instead of upholding Venezuela’s right to determine its fate, Machado has positioned the nation as a pawn in great power games.
Her admiration for US intervention did not fade with successive American administrations. She lauded Donald Trump’s muscular displays of naval power in the Caribbean — a provocation that risked inciting regional conflagration under the guise of fighting narcotrafficking. Rather than opposing the politics of threat and militarism, Machado positioned herself as a ready intermediary, willing to “deliver Venezuela’s sovereignty on a silver platter”.
Engineering Social Chaos: “Peace” by Barricade
Machado’s vision of “peaceful protest” notoriously unraveled in 2014’s “La Salida” movement, which she helped engineer. Far from principled civil disobedience, the strategy openly echoed “guarimba” street warfare: burning barricades, torched buses, attacks on medical brigades, destruction of schools and public infrastructure, and mob intimidation of civilians suspected of pro-government sympathies. In these violent campaigns, the line between legitimate dissent and urban warfare was intentionally blurred — Machado’s rhetoric turned barricaded streets and paralyzed cities into instruments of pressure, not democratic discourse.
Humanitarian consequences were brushed aside. With calls to de-legitimize and blockade entire neighborhoods, “opposition” under Machado’s leadership was often indistinguishable from sectarian terror. While the international press fixated on government overreach, the reality on Venezuelan streets — attacks on ambulances, nearly murdered Cuban doctors, and hunger amid embargoes — was sanctioned by opposition dogma.
Embrace of Trump and the US Far Right
Perhaps the most jarring dimension is Machado’s public alignment with Donald Trump, a figure internationally reviled for his policies on migration, race, and authoritarianism. On receiving the Nobel, Machado made no secret of her loyalty, dedicating the honour to Trump and hailing his “decisive support.”
For millions of Latino migrants and their families — including thousands of Venezuelan mothers searching for children vanished under US immigration enforcement — her embrace of the Trump administration is an affront. She praises the same leadership that caged migrant children, weaponized borders, and presided over the plundering of Venezuela’s foreign assets. Her “pro-democracy” narrative, therefore, serves as little more than window-dressing for policies of division, exclusion, and dispossession.
Neoliberal Playbook: From Public Wealth to Private Hands
Ideologically, Machado advances the failed neoliberal recipes of the 1990s — licensing the privatization of Venezuela’s oil, water, and infrastructure to multinational corporations. Far from empowering ordinary citizens, such agendas historically deepened poverty and inequality across Latin America. That she markets these policies as “freedom” is symptomatic of a broader trend: selling exploitation with the language of liberation.
Her campaign promises to reopen Venezuela’s embassy in Jerusalem and openly embrace Israel’s militarist and apartheid policies further illustrate her willingness to side with global powers indifferent to justice or public welfare.
The Wider Pattern: Legitimizing Violence in the Name of Peace
The Nobel Prize committee’s decision follows a disturbing pattern in global “peace” narratives — one where architects of suffering, so long as they recast violence as “democracy promotion,” are feted and uplifted while grassroots peacemakers are sidelined.
In an era defined by humanitarian catastrophe from Gaza to Caracas, rewarding those complicit in collective punishment and war is not just a moral lapse; it corrodes the credibility of the world’s most significant honour for peace.
As critics have pointed out, real peace is built not by politicians in boardrooms or those who curry favor with global superpowers, but by those organizing mutual aid, defending sovereignty, and demanding the return of children to broken families. Venezuela’s mothers grieving the loss of young lives, Indigenous communities protecting rivers, and ordinary citizens surviving the assaults of economic warfare exemplify the true spirit of peace denied and betrayed by this year’s Nobel selection.
What the Award Truly Recognizes
By elevating Maria Corina Machado, the Nobel Committee exposes the hollowness now at the heart of its prize. This is not the celebration of peacemaking, but the sanctification of regime change, collective punishment, and permanent tension. If the award once stood for healing wounds and mending divided societies, it is this year’s recipient who most forcefully demonstrates just how far from that vision we have strayed.
Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St. Xaviers College, Mumbai .
Picture credit social media
