Tribute to Maria Corina Machado
On the occasion of having won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025, we would like to remind the world of all the struggle of the Venezuelan people for the freedom not just of their country, but of all nations. If you prefer, you can see a video summary here.
The stage for Maria Corina Machado is the decline of Venezuela, once a prosperous democracy, into first dictatorship, and then abject poverty. After World War Two, Venezuela was the fourth richest country in the world, thanks to its oil wealth, but it was a dictatorship. In 1958 the people overthrew the dictator, and a liberal democracy was established. When Maria Corina was born in 1967, the castro-communist dictatorship on Cuba had already tried and failed to spread its revolution to Venezuela — although it had managed to establish guerrillas in Colombia, one of which survives to this day. When Maria Corina was 22 and studied engineering in the excellent Venezuelan education system, Fidel Castro was behind another strategy for taking power in Venezuela: The “Caracazo”, a staged violent rebellion in the capital. That, too, failed. Three years later Fidel tried again. Twice in 1992 his minions led by Hugo Chávez staged violent military coups, in February and November, but both were defeated by the defenders of democracy.
However, once released from prison for his failed military coup, Hugo Chávez was elected president and sworn in to office in 1999, and within a year he and his associates had re-written the Constitution in order to implement their socialist reorganization of the state that they styled as a revolution.
Venezuela being a major oil producing country, the oil company PDVSA was the crown jewel in the state. It was professional and well managed, but Chavez fired the professionals to install socialist loyalists instead. This led to widespread protests and a million-head strong march on the presidential palace on April 11th, 2002, demanding the resignation of the president. He ordered a military response to a peaceful march with women and children, but the military refused. Chávez then got a lower official who commanded a few tanks to drive out on the streets, but his superior office ordered him to return to base as soon as they found out. Unfortunately, the TV had already seen the tanks, and those images were later used all over the world to sell the communist lie that this had been a military coup, while in reality it was president Chávez himself who had ordered them out, and the order was to shoot at innocent protesters, not to overthrow the president. More than a dozen protesters were shot, though, but not by the military. They were shot by municipal employees that the mayor had placed around the presidential palace. After the event they were murdered to eliminate witnesses.
Chávez had to resign, but two days later a military coup reinstalled him as president.
The popular protests against Chávez continued, and civil society demanded a recall election of Hugo Chavez. This is where Maria Corina Machado enters the stage with the organization Súmate, which means “Join” or “Sign on”. To force a recall election, they needed a large number of signatures. Thanks to the tenacity and insistence, not at least by Maria Corina, they got the required number.
However, the Chávez regime had deliberately printed the forms with an error, in order to disqualify the signatures. Only when the person in charge at the election authority CNE, Ana Diaz, stated that it was CNE themselves that had committed the error, and that the signatures therefore had to be approved, the recall referendum was approved. Ana Diaz, meanwhile, was persecuted and had to flee the country, and I am proud to say that she later became a spokesperson for the organization behind this video, Operación Libertad Venezuela.
The recall referendum was set for 2004, and a new all electronic voting system was deployed. The election authority CNE declared that the challenge had lost, but it was later found that they had committed systematic electronic election fraud in the vote counting.
The dictatorship held on to power, and Maria Corina Machado went into politics and got herself elected Congresswoman with a convincing margin. In Congress she was an outspoken and fearless critic of the Chávez, who in vain tried to belittle her.
In 2012 she was a primary candidate for the opposition in the presidential elections. The primaries were won by Henrique Capriles, in an election organized by CNE, again using an electronic election system. The main novelty was that by then the system was connected to Cuba via an undersea fiberoptic cable.
In the presidential election October 7th, 2012, a by then visibly sick Hugo Chávez was declared winner for a third period, something that was against the Constitution but he had himself had the Constitution changed to fit his plans. A few months later he died during an operation on Cuba, before being sworn in, and Nicolas Maduro started governing unconstitutionally in his place with the backing of Diosdado Cabello, who apart from a leading politician also was and remains the leader of the military drug cartel known as “El Cartel De Los Soles”. They claimed that Chávez was still alive in a hospital on Cuba, although they had turned off the life support on December 30th, 2012.
This was the spark that lit up street protests again.
Students chained themselves together outside the Cuban embassy in Caracas, demanding that Cuba return Chávez to Venezuela. The strategy had been devised by Operación Libertad Venezuela in order to denounce the Cuban plans to take over Venezuela and convert the country into a colony of Cuba. Cuba eventually relented, the Cuban flags were removed from the Venezuelan military bases, and Chávez was returned to Venezuela. They kept insisting that he was alive, they had his daughters say that he was, but it was all a lie and virtually everybody in Venezuela knew soon enough that Chávez was dead.
Eventually the usurper to the presidency, Nicolas Maduro, had to relent and admit that Chávez was dead, and call for new elections. On April 14th, 2013, Maduro faced Capriles. We transmitted live in Operación Libertad Venezuela, and the former head of the Venezuelan military intelligence, general Carlos Peñaloza, called the producer, Ulf Erlingsson, at 6 PM, with the exact election results that they had intercepted as transmitted from Cuba. Five hours later the election authority CNE reported the results, and it was exactly as we had been told, to two decimals, when the voting had not yet finished. The real result was that Capriles had won, and our spokesperson, Ana Diaz, ex director in CNE, went out with that result in our live transmission. That is how we tied the hands of the opposition candidate Henrique Capriles. Since we had claimed that he had won, he could not concede without losing face. Instead, he called for a march on the CNE offices a few days later. Not immediately, but in three days.
Predictably people protested, predictably the regime met the protests with deadly force again, and Capriles called of the march and conceded the loss.
For many outside observers it may be hard to understand what happened, so an explanation may be in order. The regime is using the strategy of “Operation Trust”, that is, they are mounting and financing their own opposition. We have ample evidence for this, including testimonies from people who witnessed it from inside. The only opposition leader allowed to win a primary in a regime organized election is one who is playing ball with the dictatorship.
Operación Libertad Venezuela knew this already in 2012, but we also knew that Maria Corina Machado was the potentially most popular leader who was completely clean and above suspicion. Some wondered why the regime allowed her to continue free, when many others were imprisoned and tortured. The answer we settled on was that the regime believed that they could successfully neutralize her with propaganda, portraying her as upper class, and that any physical action against a young and attractive woman would be counter-productive in the public opinion; that it risked elevating her to an almost “saint” status instead of neutralizing her. The regime has some of the best strategists in the world behind them, and they should, considering the amount of money they are willing to pay for good advice. In Venezuela, as well as in Colombia, women are treated with much more respect than what a European and North American audience might realize.
Already then, we in Operación Libertad Venezuela understood that María Corina Machado was the best candidate for leading the liberation of Venezuela. However, the violence had scared people off the streets, so the first step in this non-violent struggle was to overcome that fear, with peaceful actions. As step one, people must get out in public so they can meet around the common cause, and start to form alliances. Various groups organized different activities of that kind, without revealing who was behind it, since the regime went after the leaders. Then, in early 2014, Maria Corina Machado together with Antonio Ledezma and Leopoldo Lopez, three nationally known opposition politicians, called to a press conference and announced a national day of public square meetings, in every town, where people could express their opinions about what should be done to resolve the crisis. They called this “La Salida”.
A few days later, Maria Corina and her team held a rally in Caracas, to talk about the result of the popular consultation. The regime responded with deadly violence, but this time, unlike when Capriles had been opposition leader, the opposition did not back down. Maria Corina did not call off the protests, but allowed people to decide for themselves what to do. The protests just grew and grew. The more violence the regime used, the more the protests grew. Soon, an entire state was in the hands of the protesters. At that time, the regime brought in tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers, who switched their Cuban uniform to the Venezuelan army uniform on the plane from Havana to Caracas. Cuban troops beat down the uprising in April of 2014, although this was most likely not reported by mainstream media.
The popular non-violent uprising grew very strong, and the regime responded with a strategy that consisted of starving people to submission. They deprived the people not just of food, but also of essential medicines. Non-violent protests were met with deadly force.
Meanwhile, Maria Corina organized people and over the course of years built up her organization, Vente Venezuela, to what effectively was a national political party, although the regime refused them permission to register as a political party.
By 2018, the Venezuelan Holodomor, had started to harvest hundreds of thousands of lives, and a mass exodus started.
In 2019 the international community made a half-hearted effort to bring in food, but the regime stopped the convoy at the border with violence. Much of the food eventually rotted away on the Colombian side of the border, while the Venezuelan people continued starving.
By the time the pandemic hit, and the border was closed, about 5 million had already fled, the so-called “caminantes”, walkers. The exodus restarted after the pandemic, and by now 8 million have fled, almost one third of the population.
After 5 years of exodus rather than protests, the regime finally relented to hold presidential elections in 2024. The regime would not hold the primaries for the opposition, however. To their surprise, the opposition arranged the primaries themselves, and Maria Corina Machado comfortably won them.
The regime’s next sabotage was to prohibit her from participating in the elections. However, Maria Corina’s opposition instead postulated Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia as candidate, a retired diplomat. The regime apparently did not believe him to be a dangerous opponent, so they went ahead with the elections.
Unbeknownst to the regime, the organization of Maria Corina Machado had in secret prepared a nationwide parallel vote count. Their organization was as quick and efficient as the official vote count from CNE, giving them access to the true result of the election even before the official result was announced.
The election on July 28th, 2024. The regime claimed victory, but Maria Corina immediately announced that they had won, and, unlike the regime, they had the physical proof to back it up. You see, they had taken the printouts from every election table in the country, photographed it’s QR code with a cell phone, and uploaded the image to a computer that added up the results in real time. They also saved the original paper slips to show the proof to the world. Meanwhile, the regime, knowing that they had lied, threw away or burned their copies.
This caught the regime off guard, and removed any semblance of legitimacy from it. Only the most die-hard dictatorial allies continued to back Maduro after that election. They are marked in red on this map.
After the election, the regime has again intensified the repression. There are many more political prisoners, and they increase by the week. The fact that Maria Corina Machado has won the Nobel Peace Prize has not put a damper on the repression.
There is a saying in Venezuela: Peace without freedom is slavery. The Venezuelan people have fought valiantly for freedom, but the enemy has been too strong. Bear in mind that it is not a simple domestic dictatorship, like some military junta, but an international organized criminal enterprise that includes several sovereign states, with Cuba and Russia as the most important ones.
To fight an international axis of criminal regimes, that is prepared to commit Holodomor, that prefers to starve the people to death rather than to cede power, is too much to ask from an unarmed people using non-violent struggle, no matter how brave and determined they are. It is simply impossible without foreign aid, and such foreign aid has, until now, not been forthcoming.
What Maria Corina Machado has accomplished is, under the circumstances, surely the most amazing and fantastic that anyone ever could have hoped for. There can be no doubt whatsoever that she, and the Venezuelan people, deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
Finally, we hope and pray that the democratic and peace-loving world one day may realize that it is in their own best self-interest to help the Venezuelan people, because if they don’t, this plague will eventually destroy freedom and democracy everywhere on this planet.