By Franklin Frederick
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Maria Corina Machado, a choice that once again demonstrates the European ruling class’s profound contempt for democracy. It is important to remember that the prestigious Sakharov Prize for 2024 had already been awarded to Venezuela’s far right. This prize is awarded by the European Parliament, according to its website:
The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought
“Each year Parliament awards the Sakharov Prize, including a monetary award of €50,000, to honour and support exceptional individuals and organisations defending human rights, democracy and fundamental freedoms.
The prize, launched in 1988, is named after Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet nuclear physicist and a strong defender of democracy and human rights. He won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to raise awareness to the dangers of the nuclear arms race.”
“The European Parliament awarded the 2024 Sakharov Prize for the Freedom of Thought to María Corina Machado as the leader of the democratic forces in Venezuela and President-elect Edmundo González Urrutia, representing all Venezuelans inside and outside the country fighting for the re-institution of freedom and democracy.
“This award is not just a recognition but also a reminder that the fight for freedom is never in vain. The future of Venezuela belongs to its people and the European Parliament stands proudly with them,” said Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament.”
The committee responsible for the Nobel Peace Prize justified its choice of Maria Corina Machado “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
The committee also reports:
“Ms. Machado has been a key, unifying figure in a political opposition that was once deeply divided – an opposition that found common ground in the demand for free elections and representative government. This is precisely what lies at the heart of democracy: our shared willingness to defend the principles of popular rule, even though we disagree. “ (…)
Venezuela’s authoritarian regime makes political work extremely difficult. As a founder of Súmate, an organisation devoted to democratic development, Ms. Machado stood up for free and fair elections more than 20 years ago. As she said: “It was a choice of ballots over bullets.” In political office and in her service to organisations since then, Ms. Machado has spoken out for judicial independence, human rights and popular representation. She has spent years working for the freedom of the Venezuelan people.
Ahead of the election of 2024, Ms. Machado was the opposition’s presidential candidate, but the regime blocked her candidacy. She then backed the representative of a different party, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, in the election. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers mobilised across political divides.»
What both the European Parliament and the Nobel Peace Prize committee are trying to do is legitimize the Venezuelan far right as a “democratic” force and consequently reinforce the narrative of President Maduro’s “dictatorial” government. They act as instruments of the European ruling class and its interests. Information about Maria Corina Machado really is widely available, if the European Parliament and the Nobel Peace Prize Committee were truly interested in defending democracy.
Regarding the 2024 election, a public opinion poll conducted in Venezuela reports the following:
“María Corina Machado’s role as leader of the far-right opposition has been rejected by 64.6% of Venezuelans, according to a study conducted by polling company Datanálisis.
With these disapproval ratings, María Corina Machado is 10 points below her previous overall popularity rating, reflecting a decline in public perception of her leadership, which has been characterized by adherence to the US political agenda and refusal to participate in the dialogue process promoted by the Venezuelan government.” (1)
And among many other articles published in various countries, I also cite this one published in Argentina:
“The violence of the right wing, which shows its true colors, generates widespread revulsion among the population, and this revulsion has certainly been the most important reason why the Venezuelan people did not elect them in times of scarcity, miserable wages, power cuts, gas shortages, preventable deaths due to lack of medicine, international blockades and sanctions, but also due to government mistakes. It was the racist and classist violence of the right wing that motivated that phrase so often heard in Venezuela over the last 10 years: We are suffering, but we do not want those who governed us before to return. María Corina Machado is the most genuine representative of this violence, as she is a white leader from an oligarchic family and has been linked to all the conspiracies, acts of vandalism, and guarimbas that have killed hundreds of Venezuelans. She represents the sector of the opposition that never wanted to run in elections and tried to violently remove Maduro from office. (2)
An important chronology of the violence perpetrated by the Venezuelan far right and published in Venezuela, ends with the following information:
“July 28 to August 3, 2024. Reelection of President Maduro. María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia again alleged electoral fraud and called for protests that resulted in an escalation of violence and destructive chaos, in a context of insurrection with criminal elements and coup tendencies. With a toll of 25 dead and 131 injured, most of the events were concentrated in the Capital District and the state of Aragua; 76.2% of the incidents occurred in the context of violent demonstrations, which were planned and organized, both the events themselves and their unfortunate consequences. Public and private property was destroyed, including educational and health facilities.” (3)
Recently, renowned Latin American political expert Dr. Francisco Dominguez wrote:
“In late 2024, Prince, a professional mercenary, alongside Venezuela’s far right, promoted a plan to deploy a private army to Venezuela. He suggested that if the US raised the bounty on Maduro’s head to $100 million, targeting not only the president but also Diosdado Cabello and the entire government, they could “just sit back and wait for the magic to happen.” Prince and Venezuela’s far right even launched a crowdfunding campaign, Ya Casi Venezuela (“Almost There, Venezuela”), to collect the $100 million. (…)
On January 12 2025, Prince sent a message of support to opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, urging her to “stay resolute.”
Prince had pushed for the bounty to be raised to $100m, but when the Biden administration ignored him, he secured backing from Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, who share his objectives. On September 20 2024, Scott and Rubio introduced the Securing Timely Opportunities for Payment and Maximising Awards for Detaining Unlawful Regime Officials Act of 2024 (the STOP Maduro Act), allocating $100m — taken from seized Venezuelan assets — to fund Prince’s efforts to depose Maduro.”
Long before all this, in 2014, a group of researchers, parliamentarians, and scholars, including Jeremy Corbyn, Dr. Francisco Dominguez, Ken Loach, and John Pilger, among others, signed a letter published by The Guardian newspaper in which they stated:
“We deplore the wave of violence from minority and extremist sections of Venezuela’s opposition, that left three dead, 60 injured and saw physical assaults on government institutions, including shots and Molotov cocktails attacks on the state TV channel and a state governor’s residency. This followed a recently launched campaign by Venezuela’s extreme right for La Salida (the ousting) of the government of President Maduro before his constitutional mandate ends in 2019. La Salida is led by extremist politicians Leopoldo López and María Corina Machado, who were both implicated in the 2002 coup in Venezuela. This is not the first time that the sections of the opposition have sought to oust the elected government by unconstitutional means, having lost at the ballot box.”(4)
Even more serious is this information, published on May 28, 2024 (5):
“Today, opposition member María Corina Machado, better known as La Sayona, who is traveling around the country asking Venezuelans to vote for the opposition candidate, Edmundo González, is the same person who in 2018 sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Argentine President Mauricio Macri calling for an attack on Venezuela under the banner of ‘regime change.’ ”
“On her social media account, the opposition justifies the use of force against Venezuela based on false arguments related to drug trafficking and terrorism, which supposedly represented a ‘real threat to other countries, including, and especially, Israel.’”
I am convinced that the international community, in accordance with the doctrine of responsibility to protect, is called upon to give Venezuelans the support they need to promote urgent regime change, with a view to restoring national and international security. For this reason, I recently sent letters to several world leaders with the aim of promoting, before the United Nations Security Council, the adoption of effective measures to protect Venezuela through the promotion of regime change, a measure that necessarily implies a strengthening of international security. Today, I want to ask Israel and Argentina to contribute their experience and influence to move toward a precise and urgent decision-making process in the Security Council,” was La Sayona’s request for foreign troops to mine Venezuelan territory.
“For this reason, this sector of the Venezuelan opposition remained complicitly silent when plans were revealed that the Argentine army had contemplated in 2019 against Venezuela during Macri’s term, which would be carried out under the justification of humanitarian reasons.”
“That is why, even today, sectors of the Venezuelan far right do not condemn the massacre that Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinian people, as they are the same people who called for an invasion of Venezuela a few years ago, solely because of their ambitions to come to power and promote ‘regime change’.”
The European Parliament and the Nobel Peace Prize committee can hardly ignore all this information. Nor should they have ignored this interesting meeting that took place this year in Europe and was widely publicized:
“Convening under the banner of “Patriots for Europe”, two months ago the European extreme right met in Madrid, bringing political leaders of the Trumpist current together like some budget, fascist Avengers. Marching under the flags of ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and neo-fascism, representatives from France, Italy, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Austria, Estonia, Greece, and Poland were hosted by Santiago Abascal of Spain’s Vox on February 8.
“In addition to the often-repeated “Make Europe Great Again,” the summit’s other prominent slogan was Reconquista, an ideologically charged term referencing the European military and cultural efforts to expel Islamic influence, culminating in the late 15th century. Viewed by its supporters as a victory for Christianity, the Reconquista involved the forced conversion of Muslims and the expulsion of Jews, while coinciding with the onset of Spanish colonisation in the Caribbean and the Americas.
And while it’s easy to see why the slogan is used by a European ultra-right obsessed with reclaiming its colonialist past and expelling the ‘infidels’ from Europe, the presence of right-wingers from Venezuela and Israel seems less natural. But Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado and the Israeli Likud party took part in it, and present themselves as frontline fighters of the same Western civilisational battle. “
But the Nobel Peace Prize committee is right when it says that democracy is under threat, since both the committee itself and the European Parliament are joining forces to defend the international far right and defame the democratically elected government of Venezuela. And this at a time when genocide is taking place in Palestine, arrogantly ignored by the European champions of democracy.
When Alfred Nobel established the prize that bears his name, he decided that the Nobel Peace Prize would be awarded by a committee based in Norway, not Sweden, like all the others. He could not have foreseen some strange events involving peaceful and developed Norway:
“The Norwegian Oil Fund, officially known as the Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), is the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, holding assets worth more than $2 trillion.
Built on the windfalls from Norway’s decades-old oil and gas industry, its scale dwarfs that of equivalent funds such as Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the UAE’s Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, or the Kuwait Investment Authority, each of which holds assets worth around $1 trillion.
Its current investments include more than £20bn ($26bn) in shares in 49 of the world’s top 100 arms companies, the majority of which are either directly or indirectly supplying Israel.” (8)
Could this have influenced the decision of the Norwegian Nobel Committee?
Coincidentally, Venezuela has one of the largest oil reserves in the world, and European and US oil companies are eager to get their hands on these resources, which the Venezuelan government—blasphemy! —uses for the benefit of the Venezuelan people! Thus, the European Parliament and the Nobel Committee join Israel in defending “democracy.”
We can no longer have any illusions. What the Nobel Committee and the European Parliament want for the Global South is a return to colonial status—that is the “democracy” they defend, the “democracy” of white supremacy and its brutality.
Meanwhile, US forces are preparing to invade Venezuela, a military invasion now sanctioned by the Nobel Prize. The European “democracies” and their allies have failed to seize Ukraine’s wealth, and they have equally failed in their attempt to seize Iran’s natural resources. Now it is Venezuela’s turn.
Throughout the Global South and in Palestine, however, resistance against white supremacy and the neocolonial order is rising. And it is not the pathetic and desperate European Parliament or the Nobel Prize committee with its ridiculous decisions that will change that. History is moving in another direction, and the future does not lie in Europe.
- https://orinocotribune.com/poll-majority-in-venezuela-do-not-approve-of-right-wing-opposition-leader-maria-corina-machado/
- https://huelladelsur.ar/2024/07/30/venezuela-volvieron-las-guarimbas/
- https://misionverdad.com/memoria/cronologia-especial-de-la-violencia-politica-en-venezuela-2002-2024
- https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/what-lies-behind-trumps-attacks-against-venezuela
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/23/violent-protest-no-help-venezuela
- https://mazo4f.com/en/a-confession-on-the-part-this-is-how-machado-called-for-attacks-against-venezuela-israel-and-argentina-letter
- https://venezuelanvoices.org/2025/04/02/what-does-maria-corina-machados-alliance-with-the-european-and-israeli-ultra-right-imply-for-the-venezuelan-people/
- https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/how-norway-home-nobel-peace-prize-profits-war-gaza
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