Political Observer.

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Oct 11, 2025

A Worthy Nobel Peace Laureate

Oct. 10, 2025

Editor: Mr. Stephens offers these brief but almost compelling introductory paragragraphs.

According to Alfred Nobel’s will, a Nobel Prize is meant to be given to those who “during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” Note the word “preceding”: Those of us who think Donald Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in ending (or at least pausing) the war in Gaza will have to wait until next year’s awards are announced.

We shouldn’t hold our breath.

In the meantime, the Norwegian Nobel Committee chose well in awarding this year’s peace prize Friday to María Corina Machado, the 58-year-old Venezuelan opposition leader now in hiding from the regime of Nicolás Maduro. By doing so, the committee also indicted that regime and its 26-year record of ruin, carried out in the name of “Bolivarian” socialism with the credulous support of many Western progressives.

Machado earned her Nobel last year when, after being blocked by the government from running for president, she rallied behind Edmundo González, a nonpartisan candidate, further helping to consolidate a once-divided opposition camp. González went on to win the vote by more than two to one, according to independent surveys, only to see Maduro ignore the result and install himself for another six-year term, throwing nearly 2,000 political dissidents into prison in the bargain.

Machado’s own career as a dissident began more than 20 years ago, after she co-founded an election-monitoring group because of her fears of the ways that Maduro’s immediate predecessor, Hugo Chávez, was systematically undermining Venezuela’s democratic institutions. In 2005, his regime charged her with treason for supporting a recall referendum; in 2014, she faced treason charges again for participating in anti-regime protests. In 2024, she published an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal that began: “I am writing this from hiding, fearing for my life, my freedom, and that of my fellow countrymen from the dictatorship led by Nicolás Maduro.”

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Editor: Andrea Lobo provides a more than compelling evaluation of the real María Corina Machado!

Nobel Prize for imperialist war and regime change goes to Washington’s Venezuelan puppet María Corina Machado

Andrea Lobo

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/10/11/sjsy-o11.html

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At the very least, the prize to Machado is an endorsement by powerful sections of the European ruling elite of a war for regime change with all its potential for opening a new front in the emerging third world war. France’s embattled “president of the rich,” Emmanuel Macron, as representative of the transatlantic establishment, declared Machado a “fighter for liberation.” What a farce!

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“I want to tell how grateful we are to President Trump and the administration for addressing the tragedy that Venezuela is going through,” she said. “Maduro has turned Venezuela into the biggest threat to the national security of the US and the stability of the region.”

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Beyond her support for imperialist intervention, the embrace of Machado’s fascist political pedigree—like the thunderous acclamations given to fascist Argentine president Javier Milei—signifies an endorsement by the “respectable” layers of the world oligarchy of a return in Latin America to the regime of terror created under the US-backed dictatorships that seized power across the region in the latter half of the 20th century.

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Machado is a champion of “free market” policies, above all the privatization of the state oil company PDVSA, whose public ownership has been upheld by a wide spectrum of bourgeois parties since the 1970s. She has endorsed Milei’s economic program of “shock therapy” in which “freedom” means the liberation of corporations to eliminate social spending and exploit the working class without any restrictions or regulations.

The scion of a Venezuelan oligarchic dynasty, her far-right politics have always been animated by hatred of the working class and of any challenge to social inequality. On this basis, she has supported crippling US sanctions that by 2020 were estimated to have caused some 100,000 excess deaths, while forcing millions to flee the country. She has likewise remained silent on the punitive anti-immigrant policies pursued by the Trump administration against hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who sought refuge in the US.

Machado has repeatedly appealed to the Venezuelan military as the country’s ultimate political arbiter, making clear that any regime she were to head would take the form of a military dictatorship from day one, committed to crushing opposition to her vastly unpopular economic and social policies.

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The anointment of Machado by imperialism is, above all, a warning: the ruling class is preparing for new crimes on a world scale. The answer must be the independent mobilization of the international working class, made conscious of its strength and its historic tasks.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/10/11/sjsy-o11.html

Political Observer.