No. of Recommendations: 4
“Fresh off Nobel Peace Prize win, opposition leader María Corina Machado says Venezuela is counting on Trump ‘more than ever’”
SNIP
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado — who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize Friday —
said she is counting on President Trump now “more than ever” as her movement is on the “threshold of victory.”
“This immense recognition of the struggle of all Venezuelans is an impetus to conclude our task: to conquer Freedom,” she told The Post in a statement from her South American hideout after the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced her win.
“We are on the threshold of victory
and today more than ever we count on President Trump, the people of the United States, the peoples of Latin America, and the democratic nations of the world as our main allies to achieve Freedom and democracy,” she added.
SNIP
She said last month that her greatest hope for toppling Maduro’s regime is President Trump, who has ordered the military to target Venezuelan-based narco ships and is building up the US naval presence in the Caribbean.https://nypost.com/2025/10/10/world-news/nobel-pea...María Corina Machado is a brave woman to acknowledge the skills of President Trump and all he has done to promote peace around the world.
No. of Recommendations: 11
María Corina Machado is a brave woman to acknowledge the skills of President Trump and all he has done to promote peace around the world.
I don't see her anywhere acknowledging "the skills of President Trump and all he has done to promote peace around the world".
What I do see is her acknowledging that she wants his help and he is her "greatest hope" (always a precarious position--just ask Mike Pence). But that is a function of the position of power that he holds, not his skills. There are many people with way better skills, but they don't have the power.
I will give Trump credit for being skilled at acquiring power, and wielding it for his own personal benefit. It is quite well known that if you want Trump's help, you need to suck up to him and flatter his ego. We've seen lots of people do that. So Maduro is doing that. She's dangling to him the possibility of him helping her as possibly helping his chances of winning next year's Prize. And that he wants very much--for his own ego, not because he's any humanitarian. That is her "best hope".
No. of Recommendations: 4
FWIW:
From the article: When I saw the headline "Maria Corina Machado Wins the Nobel Peace Prize," I almost laughed at the absurdity. But I didn’t, because there’s nothing funny about rewarding someone whose politics have brought so much suffering. Anyone who knows what she stands for knows there’s nothing remotely peaceful about her politics.
If this is what counts as “peace” in 2025, then the prize itself has lost every ounce of credibility.
I’m Venezuelan-American, and I know exactly what Machado represents.
She’s the smiling face of Washington’s regime-change machine, the polished spokesperson for sanctions, privatization, and foreign intervention dressed up as democracy.
Machado’s politics are steeped in violence. She has called for foreign intervention, even appealing directly to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Gaza’s annihilation, to help “liberate” Venezuela with bombs under the banner of “freedom.”
She has demanded sanctions, that silent form of warfare whose effects—as studies in The Lancet and other journals have shown —have killed more people than war, cutting off medicine, food, and energy to entire populations.
Machado has spent her entire political life promoting division, eroding Venezuela’s sovereignty, and denying its people the right to live with dignity.
Machado isn’t 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.
This is who Maria Corina Machado really is:
- She helped lead the 2002 coup that briefly overthrew a democratically elected president, and signed the Carmona Decree that erased the Constitution and dissolved every public institution overnight.
- She worked hand in hand with Washington to justify regime change, using her platform to demand foreign military intervention to “liberate” Venezuela through force.
- She cheered on Donald Trump’s 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.” While Trump sent warships and froze assets, Machado stood ready to serve as his local proxy, promising to deliver Venezuela’s sovereignty on a silver platter.
- She pushed for the US sanctions that strangled the economy, knowing exactly who would pay the price: the poor, the sick, the working class.
- She helped construct the so-called “interim government,” a Washington-backed puppet show run by a self-appointed “president” who looted Venezuela’s resources abroad while children at home went hungry.
- She vows to reopen Venezuela’s embassy in Jerusalem, aligning herself openly with the same apartheid state that bombs hospitals and calls it self-defense.
- Now she wants to hand over the country’s oil, water, and infrastructure to private corporations. This is the same recipe that made Latin America the laboratory of neoliberal misery in the 1990s.
Machado was also one of the political architects of La Salida, the 2014 opposition campaign that called for escalated protests, including guarimba tactics. Those weren’t “peaceful protests” as the foreign press claimed; they were organized barricades meant to paralyze the country and force the government’s 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.”
She praises Trump’s “decisive action” against what she calls a “criminal enterprise,” aligning herself with the same man who cages migrant children and tears families apart under ICE’s watch, while Venezuelan mothers search for their children disappeared by US migration policies.
If Henry Kissinger could win a Peace Prize, why not María Corina Machado? Maybe next year they’ll give one to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation for “compassion under occupation.”
Machado isn’t 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.
If Henry Kissinger could win a Peace Prize, why not María Corina Machado? Maybe next year they’ll give one to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation for “compassion under occupation.”
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.
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’s the peace Venezuela, Cuba, Palestine, and every nation of the Global South deserves.
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Michelle Ellner is a Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK. She was born in Venezuela and holds a bachelor’s degree in languages and international affairs from the University La Sorbonne Paris IV, in Paris. After graduating, she worked for an international scholarship program out of offices in Caracas and Paris and was sent to Haiti, Cuba, The Gambia, and other countries for the purpose of evaluating and selecting applicants.
