{"id":152481,"date":"2025-10-11T02:06:14","date_gmt":"2025-10-11T09:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=152481"},"modified":"2025-10-11T02:06:14","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T09:06:14","slug":"when-maria-corina-machado-wins-the-nobel-peace-prize-peace-has-lost-its-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2025\/10\/11\/when-maria-corina-machado-wins-the-nobel-peace-prize-peace-has-lost-its-meaning\/","title":{"rendered":"When Maria Corina Machado Wins the Nobel Peace Prize, \u2018Peace\u2019 Has Lost Its Meaning"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/venezuelanalysis.com\/guest-author\/michelle-ellner\/\">Michelle Ellner<\/a> Courtesy Venezuela Analysis<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n<p><strong>Far from a symbol of peace, the article exposes Machado&#8217;s history of supporting coups, sanctions, and calls for foreign military intervention in Venezuela.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/venezuelanalysis.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/download.jpg.webp\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Maria Corina Machado is known for her incendiary speeches (AP)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When I saw the headline&nbsp;<em>Maria Corina Machado wins the Peace Prize<\/em>, I almost laughed at the absurdity. But I didn\u2019t, because there\u2019s nothing funny about rewarding someone whose politics have brought so much suffering. Anyone who knows what she stands for knows there\u2019s nothing remotely peaceful about her politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If this is what counts as peace\u201d in 2025, then the prize itself has lost every ounce of credibility. I\u2019m Venezuelan-American, and I know exactly what Machado represents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>She\u2019s the smiling face of Washington\u2019s regime-change machine, the polished spokesperson for sanctions, privatization, and foreign intervention dressed up as democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Machado\u2019s politics are steeped in violence.&nbsp;She has called for foreign intervention, even appealing directly to Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Gaza\u2019s annihilation, to help liberate\u201d Venezuela with bombs under the banner of freedom,\u201d She has demanded sanctions, that silent form of warfare whose effects \u2013 as studies in The Lancet and other journals have shown \u2013 have killed more people than war, cutting off medicine, food, and energy to entire populations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Machado has spent her entire political life promoting division, eroding Venezuela\u2019s sovereignty and denying its people the right to live with dignity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>This is who Maria Corina Machado really is:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>She helped lead the 2002 coup that briefly overthrew a democratically elected president, and signed the\u00a0<em>Carmona Decree<\/em>\u00a0that erased the Constitution and dissolved every public institution overnight.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>She worked hand in hand with Washington to justify regime change, using her platform to demand foreign military intervention to liberate\u201d Venezuela through force.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>She cheered on Donald Trump\u2019s threats of invasion and his naval deployments in the Caribbean, a show of force that risks igniting regional war under the pretext of combating narcotrafficking.\u201d While Trump sent warships and froze assets, Machado stood ready to serve as his local proxy, promising to deliver Venezuela\u2019s sovereignty on a silver platter.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>She pushed for the U.S. sanctions that strangled the economy, knowing exactly who would pay the price: the poor, the sick, the working class.\u00a0<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>She helped construct the so-called interim government\u201d a Washington backed puppet show run by a self-appointed president\u201d who looted Venezuela\u2019s resources abroad while children at home went hungry.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>She vows to reopen Venezuela\u2019s embassy in Jerusalem, aligning herself openly with the same apartheid state that bombs hospitals and calls it self-defense.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Now she wants to hand over the country\u2019s oil, water, and infrastructure to private corporations. This is the same recipe that made Latin America the laboratory of neoliberal misery in the 1990s.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Machado was also one of the political architects of La Salida, the 2014 opposition campaign that called for escalated protests, including&nbsp;<em>guarimba<\/em>&nbsp;tactics. Those weren\u2019t peaceful protests\u201d as the foreign press claimed; they were organized barricades meant to paralyze the country and force the government\u2019s fall. Streets were blocked with burning trash and barbed wire, buses carrying workers were torched, and people suspected of being Chavista were beaten or killed. Even ambulances and doctors were attacked. Some Cuban medical brigades were nearly burned alive. Public buildings, food trucks, and schools were destroyed. Entire neighborhoods were held hostage by fear while opposition leaders like Machado cheered from the sidelines and called it resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/venezuelanalysis.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/96166835_burningafp.jpg.jpg.webp\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-154910\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Orlando Figuera, murdered during the 2017&nbsp;<em>guarimbas,<\/em>&nbsp;the wave of violent unrest led by Venezuela\u2019s far right in the streets of Caracas. (Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>She praises Trump\u2019s decisive action\u201d against what she calls a criminal enterprise,\u201d aligning herself with the same man who cages migrant children and tears families apart under ICE\u2019s watch, while Venezuelan mothers search for their children disappeared by U.S. migration policies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Machado isn\u2019t a symbol of peace or progress. She is part of a global alliance between fascism, Zionism, and neoliberalism, an axis that justifies domination in the language of democracy and peace. In Venezuela, that alliance has meant coups, sanctions, and privatization. In Gaza, it means genocide and the erasure of a people. The ideology is the same: a belief that some lives are disposable, that sovereignty is negotiable, and that violence can be sold as order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If Henry Kissinger could win a Peace Prize, why not Mar\u00eda Corina Machado? Maybe next year they\u2019ll give one to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation for compassion under occupation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Every time this award is handed to an architect of violence disguised as diplomacy, it spits in the face of those who actually fight for peace: the Palestinian medics digging bodies from rubble, the journalists risking their lives in Gaza to document the truth and the humanitarian workers of the Flotilla sailing to break the siege and deliver aid to starving children in Gaza, with nothing but courage and conviction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/venezuelanalysis.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/thumbs_b_c_2acecc065ae230e8c02e9f0015e6ac1c.jpg.webp\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-154909\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The&nbsp;<em>Sumud Flotilla<\/em>, a civilian mission sailing to break the siege on Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid. The kind of courage that truly deserves a Peace Prize. (Sumud Flotilla)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>But real peace is not negotiated in boardrooms or awarded on stages. Real peace is built by women organizing food networks during blockades, by Indigenous communities defending rivers from extraction, by workers who refuse to be starved into obedience, by Venezuelan mothers mobilizing to demand the return of children seized under U.S. ICE and migration policies and by nations that choose sovereignty over servitude. That\u2019s the peace Venezuela, Cuba, Palestine, and every nation of the Global South deserves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.codepink.org\/gazaprize\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tell the Nobel Committee: The Peace Prize belongs to Gaza\u2019s journalists, not Mar\u00eda Corina Machado!<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The views expressed in this article are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelanalysis editorial staff.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michelle Ellner Courtesy Venezuela Analysis Far from a symbol of peace, the article exposes Machado&#8217;s history of supporting coups, sanctions, and calls for foreign military intervention in Venezuela. Maria Corina Machado is known for her incendiary speeches (AP) When I saw the headline&nbsp;Maria Corina Machado wins the Peace Prize, I almost laughed at the absurdity. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152481"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152482,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152481\/revisions\/152482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}