Nobel Laureate María Corina Machado: Murder is an Act of Love/ By Kurt Nimmo

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate, María Corina Machado, leader of the opposition Vente Venezuela party, told Face the Nation on December 15 that “peace is an act of love.” Machado’s version of “love” is intervención en Venezuela—violent regime change and the murder of an untold number of Venezuelans.

Machado, the multi-millionaire “opposition leader” under investigation in a plot to assassinate Nicolás Maduro, traveled incognito to Norway to accept the Nobel Prize. She was aided in the effort by the Grey Bull Rescue Foundation, an organization founded by Bryan Stern, a former Naval intelligence officer. During a news conference in Oslo with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store, Machado was asked about the prospect of the Trump administration invading Venezuela.

“Some people talk about invasion in Venezuela, the threat of an invasion in Venezuela, and I answer, ‘Venezuela has already been invaded,’” she responded, deflecting from a direct answer to the question.

“We have the Russian agents, we have the Iranian agents, we have terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, operating freely in accordance with the regime. We have the Colombian guerrilla, the drug cartels that have taken over 60 percent of our populations—and not only involving drug trafficking but in human trafficking, prostitution.”

The unsubstantiated claim of Hezbollah activity in Venezuela was first published in The New York Times (Nicholas Casey, “Secret Venezuela Files Warn About Maduro Confidant”).

“Nicholas Casey follows faithfully in [Judith] Miller’s footsteps, authoring dubious, anonymously sourced stories that coincidentally happen to further US regime-change objectives,” explain Lucas Koerner and Ricardo Vaz for Venezuelanalysis.

Judith Miller is The New York Times journalist responsible for publishing “misinformation” about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction.” It is believed Miller obtained cynically calculated “misinformation” from CIA operative Valerie Plame. However, an internal email revealed Miller’s source was, according to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, none other than Ahmed Chalabi‘s Iraqi National Congress, created by the CIA in the 1990s. (“Selective Intelligence,” The New Yorker, May 5, 2003.)

Machado’s remarks about Hezbollah, Hamas, et al, are a regurgitation of past propaganda designed to demonize Venezuela.

“Chávez was linked to every group and movement already demonized: Colombian guerrillas, ETA, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas,” writes Clodovaldo Hernández. “His government was accused of supplying uranium for the ‘Iranian atomic bomb’ and of every fabrication brewed by right-wing media and intelligence laboratories.”

There is nothing nefarious about Russia’s relationship. Venezuela is Russia’s most important trading and military ally in Latin America. The relationship has a long history dating back to the Soviet Union and its diplomatic recognition of Venezuela beginning in 1945. Russia recognized Maduro as president in 2018 while the European Union, Canada, and the United States insisted Juan Guaidó was the legitimate president.

“Guaidó’s party, Popular Will [Voluntad Popular], is a far-right marginal group whose most enthusiastic boosters are John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, and Mike Pompeo,” writes Roger Harris.

Guaidó was a member of “Generation 2007,” a rightwing youth group “that included the participation of Leopoldo López, a Princeton-education man who came from one of Venezuela’s richest families… who long worked with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED),” writes Dave Rosen. NED inherited the regime change activities of the CIA after revelations in the late 1970s exposed the agency’s criminal conduct (see William Blum, “Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy”).

The Trillion Dollar Opportunity

Earlier this year, Machado participated in “The Trillion Dollar Opportunity” scheme hosted by the Americas Society/Council of the Americas (AS/COA), a New York-based non-governmental organization founded in 1965 by billionaire David Rockefeller. “This working session occurred hours after Ana Corina Sosa Machado, the opposition leader’s daughter, received a medal in her mother’s name from the same organization,” reports the Orinoco Tribune.

Currently, María Corina Machado and former presidential candidate Edmundo González Urrutia make up the Venezuela Working Group… Leopoldo López, Freddy Superlano, David Smolansky, Carlos Vecchio and Guaidó himself, members of the Popular Will (VP) party, have participated in these activities, which refer to AS/COA’s level of articulation with assets of Venezuela’s far-right opposition leadership.

Machado and her “economic advisors” peddled the “trillion dollar” plan during an AS/COA event on June 12, 2025. It consists of standard elements of the neoliberal toxic panacea—“market liberalization, privatization, macroeconomic and regulatory stability, and the return of independent institutions and rule of law,” according to the AS/COA website. In short, the same “solutions” imposed under Carlos Andrés Pérez and his oligarchic Fourth Republic prior to the election victory of Hugo Chávez in 1999.

The trillion dollar corporate swindle, billed as an “economic transformation,” envisions 500 companies privatized. The state would be ruled by Machado and the Venezuelan financial elite. They would attract large-scale private investment and turn the country away from Chavismo and steer it into a compliant state in obeyance of the “rules-based” financial order.

IMF Austerity and Caracazo

During his presidential campaign, Pérez promised to oppose economic liberalization, but subsequently capitulated. The plan put in place was known as El Gran Viraje (The Great Turnaround) in response to “macroeconomic imbalances” in the Venezuelan economy, primarily as a result of a debt crisis, corruption, cronyism, and dependence on oil revenues, the price of which had plummeted in the 1980s.

The economic free fall hit the poorest people the hardest.

The situation was so dire that people living in Caracas’ slums resorted to eating dog food, known as Perrina, just to survive. Salaries plummeted, poverty skyrocketed.

Between 1984 and 1995, the poverty rate rose from 36% to 66%. In 1987, the wealthiest 5% of the population earned 42 times more than the poorest 5%. Ten years later, that gap had widened 53 times.

The International Monetary Fund proposed a loan of $4.5 billion on the condition Venezuela impose “corrective” measures. In autocratic fashion, Pérez imposed austerity without the support of the government or political groups. The plan resulted in the end of fuel subsidies and an increase in fares for public transport. Venezuela was compelled to allocate 50 percent of its export earnings to the IMF to settle its debt and this resulted in the majority of the population suffering.

In addition to fuel and transport price increases, the government liberalized prices across the board with the exception of the most basic necessities. In addition, electricity, telecommunications, and water increased by 100 percent over a short period of time.

These measures resulted in protests, known as Caracazo. The government declared a state of emergency and there followed a heavy-handed response by security forces and the military.

“Official figures place the death toll at just under 300, but other estimates indicate up to 3,000 were gunned down in the wave of protest,” reported TeleSUR English. “It was to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. The people could take no more, exploding with the Caracazo and becoming a mass uprising of tens of thousands of people across the country.”

Constitutional rights were suspended under a state of emergency. The army was sent to the cities to quell the protests. There were extrajudicial killings, raids, torture, forced disappearances, and other violations of civil rights. Hundreds of people were gunned down in the street, their bodies later put in plastic bags and loaded on trucks.

The widespread poverty and shortage of basic necessities in present-day Venezuela, exacerbated by sanctions imposed by the United States, will worsen if an intervention by the Trump administration is successful, Maduro is deposed, and Machado and Vente Venezuela are installed.

During an interview, Machado told Donald Trump exactly what he wanted to hear: US oil companies will “make a lot of money” after she is installed, and the Venezuelan state-owned oil corporation will be sold to the highest bidder. US corporations will be allowed to pillage the nation’s bounty of natural resources.

“Venezuela is going to be the brightest opportunity for investment of American companies, of good people that are going to make a lot of money,” she promised.

Julian Assange Files a Criminal Complaint Against Nobel Foundation

In the past, the then prestigious Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to individuals who sincerely deserved it. Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela were awarded the prize for their work. In 1975, however, the award was tarnished when it was given to Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s Secretary of State, responsible for engineering the bombing of Vietnam and assisting a brutal coup by Salvador Allende in Chile. The prize was further degraded in 2009 when it was awarded to President Barack Obama. He was responsible for 563 drone strikes that killed approximately 3,797 people, including 41 Pakistani civilians attending a funeral. Moreover, the Obama administration dropped 26,171 bombs across seven countries: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.

The degradation of the Nobel Peace Prize continued when it was given to María Corina Machado on October 10, 2025 “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.” In turn, Machado dedicated the prize to the “suffering people of Venezuela” and “President Trump for his decisive support of our cause.”

In response to Machado receiving the prize, WikiLeaks founder and former political prisoner Julian Assange filed criminal charges against the Nobel Foundation on December 17. According to a WikiLeaks press release, the

WikiLeaks founder alleges that the 2025 Peace Prize award to María Corina Machado constitutes misappropriation and facilitation of war crimes under Swedish law [and the lawsuit] seeks to freeze 11 million Swedish kronor (1.18 million USD) in pending transfers to Machado.

The Assange criminal complaint accuses 30 individuals associated with the Nobel Foundation “of committing alleged serious offenses, including the offense of serious misappropriation of funds, facilitation of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and financing the crime of aggression.”

Assange pointed out that the Peace Prize shall be awarded to an individual who “conferred the greatest benefit on mankind” by “having done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Assange stressed that the political decision of the Norwegian selection committee to award the prize to Machado represents “a misappropriation of the endowment.”

Machado, the complaint stresses, does not meet the criteria of the award due to her facilitation

of war crimes, including the crime of aggression and crimes against humanity, in violation of Sweden’s obligations under Article 25(3)(c) of the Rome Statute, because the accused are aware of Machado’s incitement and support for the commission of international crimes by the United States, and knew or should have known that the disbursement of Nobel funds would contribute to extrajudicial executions of civilians and shipwreck survivors at sea, and are failing in their obligation to cease the disbursements.

Concurrent to the Assange criminal complaint, the Trump administration moved to escalate its provocations against Venezuela. It ordered the seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker in violation of international law and, on December 16, ordered a full blockade of tankers leaving and entering Venezuelan ports.

Finally, in a bizarre statement that reveals the imperialistic hubris of the administration, Stephen Miller, Trump’s combative top aide, said Venezuelan oil belongs to the United States. According to Miller, Venezuela’s nationalization of its oil reserves is a “tyrannical expropriation” and “the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property.”

Conveniently left unmentioned by Miller and Trump is the fact that, despite the involvement of US and British companies in early oil exploration in Venezuela, the oil is the sole property of the Latin American country under the international law principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources.

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Kurt Nimmo is a journalist, author, and geopolitical analyst, New Mexico, United States. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Visit the author’s blog.

Featured image is from the author

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