I do not follow very much the Nobel Peace Prize, seeing it as a highly over-rated award but some people still view it highly, most notably the idiot president of the US. So I did not know much about this year’s winner Maria Corina Machado other than that she was a right wing opposition leader in Venezuela. The mainstream media in the US did not go into many details of her life.

But then her sucking up to Trump was truly nauseating and I began to wonder exactly what her background was. Nuvpreet Kalra has taken a deep dive into Machado’s life and she seems to be much worse than I thought, in that rather than being a doughty fighter for the people of the opposition, she seems to be just another member of the oligarchy, using popular movements to serve the interests of the wealthy including her own.

Maria Corina Machado was born in 1967 into one of the wealthiest families in Venezuela. This wealth came from their ownership and control of Venezuela’s largest private-sector steel company, Sivensa, and its largest private steel processor, Sidetur. Her family also benefited greatly from the 1997 privatization of Sidor, the largest steel-maker in Venezuela, as they held a controlling stake. Between 2008 and 2010, the Chávez government nationalized all three of these companies, which stripped the Machado family of their life of abhorrent luxury while most Venezuelans suffered. Like many of this era, these wealthy families never forgave the revolutionary government for providing for the Venezuelan people.

In her youth, with all of the riches of these companies, Machado was educated at an elite boarding school in the United States, which costs $78,000 a year in today’s money. She then studied engineering at the graduate and post-graduate levels. After completing her studies, she spent a brief stint in her family’s steel company before she moved into philanthropy. It is not hard to see where her virulent pro-US politics has come from. But US-Machado relations go back a long way, which is why her handing Trump the Nobel Peace Prize today is not the first occasion where she has shown her true nature as a US-backed asset.
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When the US imposed sanctions on Venezuela, formally in 2005, Machado was one of the loudest and most abrasive supporters. On many occasions, she has been boldly in support of these unilateral coercive measures that have killed over 100,000 people and caused absolute misery for Venezuelans.

Beyond her support for sanctions, Machado’s appetite for the murder of her own countrymen is seen through her support for the US naval armada as well as murderous US attacks on small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, which have killed over 120 people since September 2025. As 70% of the US oppose war on Venezuela, as families mourn their loved ones, and as millions of dollars are used to fund warship deployments in the Caribbean, Machado said, “I totally support [Trump’s] strategy. I think it is the right thing to do. It’s courageous. It’s visionary”. Perhaps Machado’s American boarding school taught her such conceptions of courage and vision, but for those of us who have seen the videos of boats being bombed, heard testimonies of the civilian victims of airstrikes in La Gauira, and watched the rabid threats of war flow unabated, they are supportive of terror and murder.

Not only are people in Venezuela being sacrificed in Machado’s dream of a ravaged, neoliberal Venezuela, but as per her duty, she also justifies US action against Venezuelans living in the United States. Machado peddled lies about drug cartels and their links to the Venezuelan government, which justified Trump’s incarceration of 200 Venezuelans in the US to the CECOT torture facility in El Salvador.
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A second prong to Machado’s role in the Venezuelan opposition is in instigating violence, both within Venezuela, through funding and provoking violent riots, and externally, encouraging foreign intervention. In 2002, Machado helped lead the US-backed coup to overthrow democratically elected President Hugo Chávez. She signed the Carmona Decree, which tried to dissolve the National Assembly, the Supreme Court, and other governmental bodies that brought about change in the interests of the Venezuelan people and away from the hoarding of foreign and domestic elites, like herself.

Machado was a key figure in organizing guarimbas, violent riots aimed at causing chaos and paralyzing the country in order to provoke political and economic collapse. In 2014, Machado was a key organizer and supporter of guarimbas that killed her political opponents, burnt down public infrastructure, and set ambulances and doctors on fire. Again in 2017, she helped to organize and fund the guarimbas, which killed 200 people and wounded more than 15,000, and caused significant damage to bus drivers, metro workers, and passengers, hospitals, roads, and other public buildings.
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While Machado has played a pertinent and critical role for the US in causing chaos, disseminating propaganda, and pushing for regime change in Venezuela, it is necessary not to see Maria Corina Machado as an individual solely motivated by her own interests. Her desire to return to Venezuela for the profits of the few at the expense of the many is certainly rooted in her elite upbringing and personal stake in a potential neoliberal Venezuela.

Her main claim to fame appears to be that she opposed Nicolas Maduro. So once again, the Nobel Peace Prize committee has give its award to a right-wing supporter of oligarchic interests and authoritarianism, who is not averse to using violence to achieve her goals..

Clearly Martin Luther King Jr. she is not.