All that remains is a funeral ceremony to certify the prize’s well-deserved demise.
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Maria Corina Machado is the culmination of a long process of moral and political decay that has irreparably damaged the prize.
They may continue to award it, year after year, but the unpleasant smell of its ethical depravity and political opportunism in the service of the American empire will accompany it forever.
As humanity’s self-proclaimed moral beacon, the Nobel Prize is dead, and all that remains is a funeral ceremony to certify its well-deserved demise.
Of course, what happened in recent days is nothing new. The prize had been discredited long before. Although, exceptionally, it was awarded to individuals whose careers were clearly marked by their commitment to peace: Martin Luther King in 1964, Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1979), Adolfo Perez Esquivel (1980), South African bishop Desmond Tutu (1984), and Nelson Mandela (1993), and a few others, the awarding of this prize to Henry Kissinger in 1973, a serial killer responsible for the brutal bombing of Vietnam and the destabilization of democratic processes such as Salvador Allende’s Chile, indelibly marked the corruption of Alfred Nobel’s original idea, which was to reward individuals or organizations fighting for the rule of peace and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.
The same can be said of Barack Obama’s award, unusually granted a few months into his term “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” according to the official statement.
Unfortunately, the facts belied the Nobel Committee because during the eight years of his administration Obama did not spend a single day without waging foreign wars or carrying out military operations abroad.
During that time, he ordered 563 attacks, mainly with drones, to eliminate “terrorist targets” in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, a shocking number when compared to the 57 attacks ordered by his predecessor George W. Bush, the inventor of the “war on terror.”
Between 384 and 807 civilians died in those countries, in the vast majority of cases when the occupant of the White House was already a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Previously, the scandalous refusal to award Mahatma Gandhi was not a mistake but a calculated political decision. He was nominated five times between 1937 and 1948 -yes, five times!- but never awarded the prize because his radical pacifism and his rejection of all forms of violence represented a radical anti-colonialism that questioned not only the ferocity of colonial domination but also the moral hypocrisy of the Western “civilization.”
His peaceful struggle against the British Empire made him unacceptable to the Norwegian parliamentarians responsible for selecting the Nobel Committee each year. Similar reasons prevented even the consideration of anti-colonial leaders such as Franz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro for his extraordinary international solidarity, and Salvador Allende, among many others.
It took a bloody dictatorship like the one that ravaged Argentina between 1976 and 1983 for the Committee to award its prize to a brave and solitary fighter like Adolfo Perez Esquivel.
The awarding of Maria Corina Machado is yet another addition to this grim inventory. She is a persistent cultivator of violence, a habit she has maintained without pause since Hugo Chavez Frias was elected president of Venezuela in December 1998 under the laws of the Fourth Republic.
As soon as the Bolivarian leader took office, Machado and other figures from the old and corrupt politics of the Fourth Republic launched a violent conspiracy. Their plans materialized on April 11, 2002, with a coup d’etat that miraculously did not end Chavez’s life.
The leaders of this reactionary uprising drafted a document pompously called the “Constitution of the Government of Democratic Transition and National Unity,” which ushered in the de facto government headed by Pedro Carmona, president of a powerful business organization: Fedecamaras.
The administration of this champion of democracy was exemplary, except for the short-lived nature of his permanence in power. But he did not waste any time, something at which progressive governments in Latin America are consummated specialists: in his first official act Carmona dissolved the National Assembly, the Supreme Court of Justice, and the National Electoral Council with the stroke of a pen; removed the Attorney General, the Comptroller of the Republic and the Ombudsman; fired all governors, mayors, and councilors; decreed the dismissal of all ambassadors, consuls, and vice-consuls, eliminated the 49 “enabling laws” and the constitutional amendment, and restored the traditional name of Venezuela to his country, abolishing its status as a Bolivarian Republic.
This entire attack on Venezuela’s democratic institutions was ratified by a selective call to the most outstanding “representatives” of Venezuela’s civil society who gathered at the Miraflores Palace to endorse the birth of the new regime by signing the document establishing the measures mentioned above. Among the signatories was Maria Corina Machado.
Was that his only a youthful sin? No, it was just the beginning of a career increasingly marked by appeals to violence. He traveled to Washington to meet with President George W. Bush in the Oval Office on May 31, 2005, requesting help to overthrow the constitutional government of Venezuela. In other words, he was proposing a U.S. military intervention that would have caused bloodshed in his own country.
He persisted in this behavior, and in March 2014, coinciding with the first of the bloody “guarimbas” -barricades set up by armed thugs and paramilitaries organized by the Venezuelan right in an attempt to bring down the government- Machado reappeared on the international scene dressed as a Panama’s unusual “alternate ambassador” at the Permanent Council meeting of the Organization of American States, even though she was a member of the National Assembly at the time.
Her goal: to request, in an act of vile treason, that the Permanent Council of the OAS organized a multinational military intervention against her own country to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro.
In 2017, the “guarimbas” resurfaced with the full support of the Venezuelan right wing and its American masters, without Maria Corina condemn in the slightest his aberrant crimes against the population.
On the contrary, throughout these years, he has repeatedly called for the intervention of foreign forces to overthrow the Bolivarian government and has never uttered the slightest condemnation of the “guarimberos” who blocked streets and roads so that no one could leave their homes, creating the image of a mass civic protest against the government to force its downfall.
Those who dared to leave were fiercely attacked, if not killed. They went so far as to burn alive people whose only crime was to appear to be Chavistas. The documentation of these crimes is overwhelming, as is Machado’s complicit silence.
It cannot be forgotten that for many years this “patriotic and pious” Venezuelan leader tirelessly advocated before the governments of the United States and the European Union for harsh economic and all kind of sanctions to be imposed on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
She was also tried for conspiracy because an NGO she created and directed received undeclared contributions from the National Endowment for Democracy, funded by the US Congress, for campaigns to destabilize the Bolivarian government.
To sum up, Maria Corina Machado is the very embodiment of the violent methods of fascism and the very antithesis of the original principles of the Nobel Prize.
In almost any other country she would have been severely punished for calling for a foreign invasion of her own country, or for advocating unilateral coercive measures that cause enormous hardship for her own people.
Her violent excesses and calculated sycophancy toward her imperial master imposed her deafening silence in the face of the horrific genocide underway in Gaza, not to mention the risks to the Venezuelan people posed by the deployment of U.S. naval forces to the southern Caribbean. and the possible aggression that may result from it.
It is not surprising that she dedicated her Nobel Prize to Donald Trump or that the entire Western media has praised her as a heroine, a champion of peace, human rights, and democracy.
Such praise for her is understandable: these are the same media outlets and the same leaders who for two years blissfully closed their eyes and endorsed, financed, and offered full diplomatic support to the Israeli government to perpetrate the barbaric genocide of the Gazans.
Reading the Western press, with very few exceptions, makes one want to vomit at such an accumulation of lies, double standards, and the systematic concealment of the countless crimes perpetrated by the right and its imperial master.
That is why the countries of the collective West, in frank and irreversible decline, are jubilantly celebrating the Nobel Prize awarded to Maria Corina Machado.
When President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Special Missions, Richard Grenell, was informed of the award given to Machado simply commented laconically: “The Nobel Prize died years ago.” He is right, but one last nail was needed to seal the coffin shut. Maria Corina Machado provided it.
