source: nacla
On October 10, it was announced that María Corina Machado had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The committee stated that it was rewarding her “tireless work promoting democratic rights” and her “struggle for a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” It also credited her with opposing militarism. As we shall see, Machado opposes Venezuelan militarism but supports others, such as Israeli militarism, and firmly believes that the “transition”—that is, the fall of the Maduro regime—depends on U.S. military intervention, a perspective that isn’t very peaceful or democratic.
Machado dedicated her prize to U.S. President Donald Trump. A week after receiving the award, she telephoned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a genocidaire with an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, and congratulated him on “his decisions and firm actions during the war, as well as Israel’s achievements.” Since 2020, Machado’s party, Vente Venezuela, has been linked to Netanyahu’s Likud through a formal alliance.
Machado also supports the far-right parliamentary group Patriots for Europe, which includes the Spanish party Vox, France’s Marine Le Pen, and other European Trumpists. In her message to the Patriots summit in February of this year, Machado declared that their fight and hers are part of the same “global struggle”: “the struggles taking place in Europe, like those we are waging in Venezuela, have the same values, purposes, and enemies.” She asserted that both the Patriots and her own movement embody “strong movements and leaderships based on values.”
Machado, an important political leader in a country with around 8 million forced migrants, a quarter of the Venezuelan population, not only supports xenophobic and racist parties, but also directly exploits American and European xenophobia to her advantage. “Venezuela is today the greatest threat facing the West […] Maduro has intentionally promoted migration as a mechanism to weaken our society and our families and to destabilize the hemisphere,” Machado said in her message to the Patriots.
Machado, an important political leader in a country with around 8 million forced migrants—a quarter of the Venezuelan population—directly exploits American and European xenophobia to her advantage.
She has also endorsed Trump’s persecution of Venezuelan migrants. In March of this year, Machado signed a statement echoing the claim that the Maduro regime was exporting “criminals employed by the Maduro regime to commit crimes abroad,” just as Trump was sending innocent Venezuelans to be tortured in Guantánamo and El Salvador. Paradoxically, she called for Venezuelan migrants not to be indiscriminately criminalized, even as she helped legitimize the narrative that Maduro is destabilizing “the hemisphere” by exporting criminals, fueling a climate of persecution and generalized suspicion.
Another example of this readiness to overlook human rights violations against Venezuelans—so long as the perpetrator is not Maduro’s regime—can be seen in her support for Trump’s war crimes in the Caribbean. In the weeks before and after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded, the Trump regime bombed at least nine boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean, killing 37 people—mostly Venezuelans, but also Colombians, Trinidadians, and possibly other nationalities. No evidence that they were drug traffickers has been made publicly available, and the boats were bombed without posing an imminent threat to the United States. At least one Ecuadorian survivor of a U.S. bombing was repatriated without being charged with any crime, increasing skepticism about the official U.S. narrative.
On September 22, Machado and Edmundo González issued a joint statement supporting Trump’s designation of the Venezuelan government as a narco-terrorist cartel, the “Cartel de los Soles.” They also endorsed “the U.S.-led anti-narcotics siege in the Caribbean Sea,” which they described as “a necessary measure for dismantling the criminal structure (of the Venezuelan government).” At that point, 14 Venezuelans had already been killed in international waters by the United States.
Machado has also embraced the Latin American far-right. When former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe was convicted in July of this year of witness tampering related to his ties to narco-paramilitarism, Machado sent him a public message of “solidarity, trust, and affection.” During Uribe’s government, thousands of young Colombians were executed and falsely presented as guerrillas in what became known as the “false positives” scandal.
Trump’s designation of the Venezuelan government as a narco-terrorist entity, and therefore a threat to the United States, bears similarities to the arguments used as a pretext for invading Iraq in 2003. Venezuela is primarily a transit country for the drugs that the United States and Europe consume abundantly, but its role is much smaller than that of U.S.-allied regimes such as Ecuador. The name Cartel de los Soles emerged before Chavismo came to power as a way of referring to military corruption related to drug trafficking. Even U.S. intelligence circles know that it is not a drug-producing and exporting cartel. As for organized crime, there is evidence that the Venezuelan government has entered into agreements and negotiations with organizations such as the Tren de Aragua gang, handing over control of prisons or “peace zones” free of police presence, and even establishing agreements related to illegal gold mining in the south of the country. But U.S. intelligence itself denies that it is an arm of the Venezuelan government, as Trump and Machado claim, or that it operates as a gang in the United States. This is not an exclusively Venezuelan phenomenon; deals with gangs have also been made by U.S.-allied governments, such as Bukele’s.
Machado’s alignment with leaders such as Netanyahu and Trump isolates the Venezuelan popular struggle by creating a false identification between a genuinely democratic cause and its current right-wing and anti-democratic leadership.
Machado is committed to a political strategy that relies on U.S. military pressure. So much so that when the Venezuelan regime perpetrated a scandalous electoral fraud in July 2024, both Machado and Edmundo González refused to support the large spontaneous mobilizations of the Venezuelan people in defense of the electoral result, abandoning them to their fate, without guidance and exposed to the regime’s savage repression. This political irresponsibility overshadows the great organizational success of having achieved not only a sweeping electoral victory but also documenting that victory with electoral tallies. It became clear that in Machado’s electoral slogan, “win and collect,” there was no plan to “collect” beyond waiting for foreign intervention.
Generally, Machado’s followers, like those of any charismatic leader, project their own ideas onto her. Hence, when her orientations, speeches, and alliances prove uncomfortable due to their anti-democratic content, such as supporting the genocide in Gaza, many prefer to believe that these are tactical feints or decisions forced by circumstances that do not reflect Machado’s own ideas. We are familiar with such rationalizations in Venezuela because, for many years, they were common among Chávez’s followers.
But Machado’s trajectory has been quite consistent, from taking part in the 2002 coup d’état as a signatory of Pedro Carmona’s self-proclamation decree, which briefly installed a business-backed dictatorship, to her commitment to Thatcherite “popular capitalism” in 2012, her call to annex the Guyanese Essequibo region in 2013, her criticism of Guaidó for not calling for a U.S. invasion in 2019, and her current commitment to Trumpist military pressure. All these positions are reflected in her international alliances and in a strategy in which imperialist intervention has a messianic role. The contours of this program were defined long before Machado won more than 92 percent of the votes in the 2023 opposition primaries to choose a presidential candidate.
Certainly, the complicity of corrupt sectors of the international left, which have continued to support Chavismo even after its dictatorial turn in 2015, contributes to alienating the Venezuelan people, who are fed up with the self-proclaimed “civil-military-police” government and accustomed to associating the catastrophic experience of Chavismo with a certain type of pseudo-leftist demagogy. But it is also true that Machado’s alignment with leaders such as Netanyahu and Trump isolates the Venezuelan popular struggle by creating a false identification between a genuinely democratic cause and its current right-wing and anti-democratic leadership.
The left in Latin America and around the world has powerful reasons to support the cause of the Venezuelan people, who are facing extreme impoverishment as a result of the destruction of three-quarters of the economy over the last 12 years and extreme labor flexibilization imposed by Chavismo. This is a historic setback for the working class, consummated before Trump’s first economic sanctions in 2017. Virtually no left-wing organization in Latin America, Europe, or the United States would accept a minimum wage of less than one dollar a month in their country, or the persecution of trade unions and the environmental destruction we endure in Venezuela.
It must be acknowledged that the weakness of international leftist support for the Venezuelan cause is also partly due to the weakness of the Venezuelan left itself. For many years, most of the local left was co-opted by the two capitalist poles in the political dispute—the traditional bourgeoisie of which Machado is a member, and the new Bolivarian bourgeoisie represented by Maduro. Only in the last five years have most left-wing organizations adopted an independent opposition perspective, although fragmentation continues to prevail for historical reasons.
It is possible to oppose both imperialist intervention and the Bolivarian dictatorship. Opposition to the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Panama never required support for Hussein or Noriega, nor minimizing their dictatorial crimes. It is time to do the same now.
As long as the Venezuelan popular struggle is mistakenly associated with support for Trump and Israel, it will be very difficult to garner sympathy beyond right-wing circles. The Venezuelan left-opposition, in its different currents, traditions, and strategies—represented by organizations such as the Communist Party of Venezuela, the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSL), Patria Para Todos (PPT-APR), or even grassroots Chavista organizations opposed to Maduro—represents a fundamental interlocutor for the Latin American left, as a sector that refutes in practice the dilemma of choosing between supporting Maduro and Putin, or Machado and Trump.
It is possible to oppose both imperialist intervention and the Bolivarian dictatorship. Opposition to the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Panama never required support for Hussein or Noriega, nor minimizing their dictatorial crimes. It is time to do the same now.
The disaster that the Chavista counterrevolution has represented, with its legacy of misery and inequality, is exploited by the international right-wing to discredit the struggles for social justice, environmental protection, women’s rights, and democratic freedoms. The Venezuelan right-wing opposition has fueled conspiracy theories that blame the Venezuelan government for the social unrest in the region, while routinely intervening in electoral processes with melodramatic warnings that not voting for the right will mean “becoming Venezuela.” It should by now be clear that only by firmly opposing dictatorships like those of Maduro and Ortega—without lending support to Trump’s imperial and fascistic delusions, and by condemning both U.S. bombings in the Caribbean and threats of bombings on the mainland—can we begin to build stronger and more credible alternatives to the advance of the far right in the region.
