Dear John,

When I saw the headline “María Corina Machado wins the 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. 

Tell the Nobel Committee: Shame on them for giving the “Peace Prize” to someone who supports genocide and coup d’etats! We, the people, instead, uplift the brave and resilient people of Gaza! 

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 Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Gaza’s annihilation, to help “liberate” Venezuela with bombs under the banner of “freedom.” She has demanded sanctions, the 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.

This is who María 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 U.S. sanctions that strangled the economy, knowing exactly who would pay the price: the poor, the sick, and 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 Chavistas 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 U.S. migration policies.

Join CODEPINK in saying: all recognition for peace and freedom should go to the people of Gaza, not to politicians who cheer for bombs and sanctions.

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 Nobel 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, like the Palestinian journalists in Gaza who, with no safety or rest, document the bombings, name the victims, and keep the truth alive when the world looks away.

Tell the Nobel Committee that they uplift war criminals, not peacemakers! 

In solidarity, 
Michelle, Medea, Teri, and the CODEPINK Latin America Team