The article below first appeared in Spanish on Ceiba. It appears for the first time in English on Red Spark (abridged). Vilalto is a Venezuelan activist, Chavista and contributing editor of ‘Ceiba: periodismo con memoria’.

The Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to Venezuelan María Corina Machado, is part of a desperate attempt by the US to maintain its global hegemony. Through a powerful communication apparatus, the political figure of Machado, a member of one of the richest families in Venezuela, is being created to advance a strange peace: violence, economic destabilisation, calls for military invasion, support for genocide and policies of persecution of the migrant population.

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Caracas, Venezuela – Humanity is witnessing its darkest and most difficult hour since the Second World War. A scenario in which the protagonists of that past tragedy, the fascists, are re-surging. The United States has lost its absolute control of the world but is dispensing its military, political, cultural and communicational power over the American countries. It operates a systemic apparatus for lying en-masse, manipulating [what Gramsci referred to as] common sense and misleading humanity. The appointment of María Corina Machado Zuloaga as the Nobel Peace Prize recipient is just another move in this direction.

María Corina Machado Zuloaga, commonly referred to as Maricori, is a representative and spokesperson for the most violent and extremist section of the bourgeoisie in Venezuela. Daughter of businessman Enrique Machado Zuloaga and psychologist Corina Parisca, Machado was born in Caracas in 1967. Educated in the most exclusive and excluding schools and universities in Venezuela (Academia Merici, UCAB, IESA), she then received additional training in the United States specifically for political leaders in academies of the Yankee establishment, such as Yale University. She was married to another representative of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie with whom she had three children, none of whom have lived in Venezuela for at least six years.

The only public office that Machado has held in Venezuela was that of deputy of the Republic, which she won in 2010 in the state of Miranda. Subsequently in 2012 she launched herself as a presidential candidate in the primary elections held among the opposition Venezuelan opposition – losing that election by gaining just 3.8 percent. Her political career and recent rise in public exposure do not correspond to her contribution to the development of Venezuela, nor to her work, talents or experience as a politician, but to Washington’s interest in creating a fictional character – another one – to carry out their orders in our country.

Politically, Machado is located on the extreme right, allied to the most reactionary elements of imperialism and national and international Zionism. While she does not seem to know what her ideology truly is, or at least she does not want to say it, nor what her political or economic program would consist of, the Vente Venezuela Party  communications [which Machado leads] claim they are “the party of freedom (…) closing populist or totalitarian cycles.” That is, they have no specific ideology or have not even thought about it. Their only goal is to end Chavismo.

In other communications, we find that Vente Venezuela defines itself as a “liberal” party and Machado in 2011 said she believed in “popular capitalism” (?) a non-existent theoretical concept, copied from the Chilean dictator and perpetrator of genocide Augusto Pinochet and the ultra-conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher. This is simply an effort by Machado’s team to position the billionaire heir as representing something “popular.”

To understand a person, it is necessary to know their ancestors and origin. That’s why we talked to Ociel Alí López, sociologist and author of the book Dale más gasolina: Chavismo, Sifrinismo y burocracia, who explained that “(…) María Corina’s family are the Machado Zuloaga’s. They arrived in Venezuela with the Guipuzcoana company [in the port of La Guaira] in 1777. This company had a commercial monopoly, administering the goods of all the provinces in Venezuela and its trade with the world. It was also at the centre of several independence uprisings (…) the Machado Zuloaga’s are one of the ‘masters of the valley’, that is, one of the twelve richest families in Venezuela, who were slaveholders and who have not recognised nor disowned their past. They were landowners, they always lived on the latifundios [large unproductive tracts of land that are increasing in value over time]. This family also had a monopoly on electricity and owned Caracas Electricity, as well as steel companies. Both sectors were nationalised by Hugo Chávez and the family’s companies were expropriated, which is why María Corina’s family has such a strong fight [against Chavismo].

Iley Sosa, a 38-year-old resident of a lively area in the center of Caracas who graduated in Environmental Management and is the mother of a young girl, tells us that “what María Corina has done is travel [with the money stolen from the State] to defame the Venezuelan people. She has sought problems, sanctions and is leading us to a conflict [with the United States]. With everything [she has done], with the guarimbas [violent street protests], she has not been able to win the presidency; this is because almost no one believes her, she is a liar and has no plan for the country. For me, she is a symbol of destabilisation, of the coup d’état that shook the country. I think she is a person with mental problems because one cannot explain how you can ask someone to invade your country, seeing how ugly and grotesque a war is. No conscious person is going to ask the gringos to invade us. Sovereignty has to be respected; politics is precisely to resolve conflicts without wars.”

Another view comes from Carolina Blanco, a retired university educator who is sixty-five years old and lives in a middle-class sector in the southwest of the capital. She says that María Corina Machado “is the reflection of an imperialist policy who desperately seeks to show herself as a valid option, masking her true intentions to dominate the nation’s riches. Unfortunately (…) a part of the population is being deceived by this false ‘libertor’, as she calls herself.”

So Machado is a bourgeois descendant of slaveholders, landowners and exploiters; she holds a hatred and disgust towards poor people and is rejected by sections of the population; she has no major contributions to the political or daily life of the Venezuelan people and is with a small and irrelevant party.

Machado’s Criminality

María Corina Machado also has a record of serious criminal acts in Venezuela. She has never recognised or faced justice for them, and the mainstream media has tried hard to hide them. Below is a chronological summary of these events, meticulously prepared by ALBA Movimientos:

• Founded Súmate, a US-funded organisation, to promote interference in Venezuela, boost chaos and destabilisation as part of the 2002 coup d’état and the subsequent attempt of oil strike-sabotage in 2002-2003.
  
  
• In the brief dictatorship (48 hours) of businessman Pedro Carmona in April 2002, Machado signed the Carmona Decree, a document that dissolved the powers and was the basis for crimes against humanity, such as siege, persecution and political murder against the people.
  
  
• In 2011, when she was an opposition presidential pre-candidate, Machado faked an attack with gunfire in the popular parish 23 de Enero, in Caracas, to gain media notoriety. A phone call she made revealed the farce.
  
  
• Machado is known for promoting terrorist actions. Together with Leopoldo López, she orchestrated a plan called “La salida” that in 2014 left dozens of dead in the country. She also fomented a spiral of violent street acts known as “guarimbas,” in which dozens of innocent people were killed. One of them was burned alive by shock groups encouraged by their hate messages.
  
  
• Regarding the call for foreign invasion, Machado is a conspicuous promoter of a military intervention in Venezuela, not only in the current situation due to the US deployment in the Caribbean, but always in her public activity, even when in the past it was ignored in plans of the US and the opposition elites to destabilise the country.
  
  
• In 2014, while she was a deputy, she usurped a post of the Panama delegation in the Organization of American States (OAS) and begged this institution to apply the “democratic charter” against Venezuela, in order to cause an invasion.
  
  
• In 2019, she called for a “peace” military force to accompany the invasion of Cúcuta, Colombia, promoted by Juan Guaidó that year. It was public what Machado’s wish was: “International Community, the support of bringing aid is not enough. They have to enter (sic),” he said on that occasion.
  
  
• Regarding the sanctions that Machado asks for the Venezuelan people, in 2015 she was one of the main figures who publicly requested “sanctions”, which have been missiles against the economy of Venezuela and have compromised the health, stability and social welfare of millions of Venezuelans.
  
  
• The unilateral coercive measures requested by Machado induced economic migration of thousands of Venezuelans. This situation has been used by Machado to manipulate Venezuelan migrants by promising them that they will return to the country. In addition, she has supported President Donald Trump’s policy of persecution of the migrant population.
  
  
• Machado has also been the author or accomplice of several violent attacks in Venezuela. The Venezuelan authorities have pointed out that she is involved in countless plans to threaten national stability, through attacks with explosives in public places and selective murders of political figures.
  
  
• Recently, Machado has been involved in a plan to attack the United States embassy in Caracas with explosives to justify a US military intervention.
  
  
• Investigations carried out by the security forces found Machado promoted plans to attack public spaces and attack figures of the Bolivarian Revolution, before and during the latest electoral processes including the most recent: the presidential elections of 2024.
  
  
• According to the investigations, Machado was responsible for the terrorist attack against the PDVSA Muscar Complex in the state of Monagas, in Eastern Venezuela. The attack sought to create national commotion, since the gas plant produces 80% of the national gas. To carry out the attack on the gas plant in Monagas, she allied himself with Erik Prince, an American mercenary who has declared his intention to generate violence by assassinating of a government figure.
  
  
• Machado is accused of promoting, after shouting fraud in the 2024 presidential elections, a failed attack on the Guri Complex to leave the country without electricity, as happened in 2019.
  
  
• She is an ally of the Israeli Zionism that is carrying out the genocide in Gaza and maintains close ties with sectors of the world’s extreme right that oppose the just causes of humanity.

The delivery of the Nobel Peace Prize to María Corina Machado is part of the plan of global capitalism in its current fascistic phase, which demands that Venezuela hands over its resources and independence. It is the Global North contributing to destabilisation and interference in the Global South.

Irene Echezuría, a sixty-two year old who lives and works in a textile store in Petare, Miranda state, the largest neighborhood in the country, says “that lady has not brought anything good for the Venezuelan people, she is with the gringos who want to invade us to take everything and they walk like vampires looking for our natural resources… but as they say around here, they can enter here, but then leave? Who knows…”. For the vast majority of the working class in Venezuela, even those who do not identify as Chavista, there is no CNN, Instagram, Hollywood or Nobel that justify a war. Venezuela is for peace.