The context and significance of María Corina Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize
First published at Luís Bonilla-Molina's blog.
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to María Corina Machado (MCM) has sparked an unusual debate on social media. However, the arguments for and against are more emotionally charged than deeply thought-provoking. Is it possible to approach Venezuelan reality only through the Manichaean perspective of polarization?
Clearly, understanding the implications of awarding this prize requires a structural analysis to comprehend the scope of the political operation behind it. Only in this way can we base possible courses of action and convergence with the military, media, and massive data-gathering offensive that has been taking place in the Caribbean in recent months. Our call is to overcome the simplistic interpretations — typical of polarized political propaganda — as well as the geopolitical interpretations that serve the very logic of power that led to the awarding of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
Of course, our position rejects any attempt by the United States to intervene militarily or through intelligence work (CIA) in Venezuela; there can be no doubt about that. What we wish to emphasize in this article is the need to build an anti-imperialism from the working class, one that overcomes deceptive leftist discourses hidden behind a geopolitical vision that obscures the material living conditions of the working class and the limitations of the current regime of political freedoms in the country.
The Nobel Peace Prize: An eternal strategy of capitalist soft power?
In historical terms, the United States, while developing its economic and military strategy of domination, also implements mechanisms of cultural control and hegemony. Soft power (Joseph Nye, 1990) consists of the North American capacity to influence geopolitical power relations and social behavior through a disguised ideological attraction to a discourse or approach, favoring persuasion over force and direct coercion; that is, allowing the dominated to adopt a position as their own.
In this sense, the Nobel Prize has historically played several roles: first, to co-opt leaders and align them with consensus-building operations — liberal, neoliberal, or illiberal — displacing discourses and actions as far as possible from those positions associated with class struggle. The rhetoric of national reconciliation often plays a central role in this orientation. Second, to neutralize anti-imperialist projects, making them appear radical, uncivilized, and unsuitable for the present, to the point of equating sovereignty and freedom with unprecedented danger to US national security. The intention is to socially isolate movements that question private property and the power of capital. Third, to reinforce the Western cultural hegemony characteristic of the nations of the powerful North. Fourth, to use humanitarian morality as an ideological weapon — from a Gramscian perspective — to justify actions that involve the disproportionate use of force. Fifth, to naturalize the domination of global finance capital, presenting market stabilization as a distinctive sign of lasting peace. This is easily verifiable by reviewing most of the circumstances and results of the Norwegian award. Let’s see.
In 1983 (Lech Walesa) and 1989 (Mikhail Gorbachev), the Nobel Prize served as a means of accelerating and legitimizing the Soviet bloc’s transition to capitalism, protecting the leadership that guaranteed it. After the dismantling of the USSR, Poland would be integrated into NATO, consolidating the eastern border of the Atlantic bloc. Gorbachev’s rhetoric on openness and transparency served as a framework for the transition to capitalism in the Soviet countries. These rhetoric, legitimized by the Nobel Prize, facilitated the imposition of market peace, guaranteeing Russia’s entry into the processes of global capital reproduction, to such an extent that today, it has become a driving force behind the potential creation of the Group of Three (G3), within the framework of the ongoing reconfiguration of international power relations stemming from the end of the world wars. The war in Ukraine and the drone provocations against the once inviolable European nations are part of this new world order that is struggling to emerge and consolidate. The Nobel Prizes awarded to Walesa and Gorbachev were part of the construction of global capitalist hegemony and the deconsolidation of American imperial power, through soft-faced dynamics. Once they advanced their goals, the laureates became minor figures.
In 1991, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Aung San Suu Kyi (Myanmar) in the context of the much-publicized democratic transition taking place in Burma, promoted by the West as an example of peaceful resistance, that is, avoiding the loss of capital control in the face of a popular uprising. Myanmar’s rise to power signified the triumph of political and economic neoliberalism over Asian progressive national models. In fact, upon coming to power, she aligned herself with Western capital, liberalizing strategic sectors while repressing ethnic minorities like the Rohingya. Consequently, the prize was a mechanism to consolidate the internal bourgeois bloc that made it possible to open the country to international energy and Western corporations, after decades of «isolation» from global market circuits and transnational capital.
Years later, after the obvious process of dismantling the PLO had begun, the Oslo Accords between Israel and Palestine were signed, their legitimacy confirmed by the 1994 Nobel Prize, shared by Shimon Pérez, Yitzhak Rabin, and Yasser Arafat. The accords, which created a «Palestinian authority,» blurred the anti-imperialist nature of the Palestinian cause, subordinating the national struggle to an administration dependent on international aid. The rise of Hamas, contrary to this logic, was a predictable effect, furthering Israel’s strategic plan to subsequently crush the Palestinian people, sweep them into the occupied territories, and lead to the current genocide in Gaza. The path to the genocide in Gaza was paved by the legitimization of the Oslo Accords with the Nobel Prize. The 1994 Nobel Prize marked the staging of the post-Cold War neoliberal consensus in Palestine.
Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, just months after assuming the presidency of the United States, as an expression of his efforts to relegitimize the country’s leadership following the disasters in Iraq and evidence of torture at Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration consolidated the new type of hybrid warfare model with the use of drones for military purposes (Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan), the invasion and destruction of Libya (2011), bombings in Syria and Iraq under the pretext of attacking ISIS, the promotion of soft coups such as that of Honduras in 2009 (Zelaya), the expansion of military bases in Africa (AFRICOM) and the Middle East, the coup d’état in Egypt (against Mohamed Morsi), the coup d’état in Ukraine (Euromaidan, 2014), as well as attempts to reorder the imperial system after the 2008 financial crisis. The Nobel Prize awarded to Obama became a symbolic operation of hegemony, attempting to present North American neocolonial leadership as ethical, and not as imperial coercion. Something that the Trump administration tried to do in 2025, without success, because geopolitical manipulation surrounding Venezuela was much more useful. The Norwegian jury’s ruling was not due to Europe’s differences with the Trump administration, as has been portrayed, because Europe is already sufficiently subservient to such a gesture of rebellion, but because Venezuela is a priority in the current situation of imperialist reorganization.
In 2016, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Juan Manuel Santos, former Defense Minister under Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who had been responsible for the «democratic security» policy and the expansion of US military bases on Colombian soil. As head of defense, he led the rescue operation for Ingrid Betancourt and 15 others, and the massacre of 17 FARC guerrillas in Ecuador, in which Raúl Reyes was killed (Operation Phoenix, 2008). As president (2010-2018), he carried out Operation Sodom (2010), which killed Commander Jojoy (Víctor Julio Suárez), and Operation Odiseo (2011), in which Alfonso Cano, the FARC’s top leader at the time, was killed. His military actions of extermination paved the way, through military means, for the possibility of political negotiation. Consequently, the purpose of the 2016 Nobel Prize was to lend an international cloak of legitimacy to the peace agreement with the FARC-EP, which, as we noted, had been preceded by armed assassination operations against that group’s leaders. With this, the United States guaranteed the implementation of a peace narrative that concealed the clauses of an agreement that diminished the possibility of radical change, especially with regard to the dominance of the Colombian bourgeoisie and its colonial relations with the North Americans. The peace process, while formally diminishing the expressions of internal war, did not modify the economic structure of wealth accumulation by a small sector, nor did it break the oligarchic control of the land that had motivated the armed uprising decades earlier. The «peace,» legitimized by the Nobel Prize, was the necessary condition to attract foreign direct investment, especially in mining, hydrocarbons, and agribusiness, consolidating the neoliberal model in that country.
This «geopolitical» path would be confirmed in 2019, when the prize was awarded to Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed for the peace agreement with Eritrea and the democratic opening he spearheaded. This closed the cycle of US interventions that led to the overthrow of the leftist DERG regime (Ethiopia’s provisional military government, 1974-1991) and the period of instability generated by the military offensive of the so-called Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) that overthrew Mengistu Haile Mariam. In reality, the award served to re-legitimize that country’s government, which aligned itself with the US and IMF strategy for the Horn of Africa. The Abiy administration (2018 – ) has promoted the privatization of public companies (telecommunications, airlines, energy, transport, logistics and ports), pushing for pro-market reforms that would insert Ethiopia into the logic of global financial capital (mega projects such as the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam), while mediating to ward off the risk of any radical change. The Abiy government has reoriented itself towards neoliberalization (operation of foreign banks, creation of the stock market)), the promotion of macroeconomic reforms with international loans (IMF and others), opening the exchange rate and making the economy more flexible, the dispossession of the communal through accumulation by displacement of the urban poor population as a result of the change in land use. After the Nobel Prize was awarded, the Tigray war (2020) revealed that the peace achieved was actually a mechanism for reorganizing state power that favored elites associated with transnational capital and Washington’s interests. Control of the Red Sea (ports in Djibouti and Eritrea) and the containment of Chinese commercial expansion are part of the behind-the-scenes analysis of the real reasons for granting this prize.
The year 2025 will be awarded to María Corina Machado, so it shouldn’t be a surprise given its purpose. To explain who the winner of this award is, I’ll summarize the article I wrote with Leonardo Bracamonte in 2024, titled «Venezuela: Who is María Corina Machado?»
María Corina Machado: Beyond Illiberalism
María Corina Machado is a militant of political illiberalism, the far right, and fascistic hatred of anything resembling the political left. She is clearly the Creole incarnation of the global rise of the far right. This does not deny or seek to hide the scope of her leadership, built on the assimilation of a significant sector of the Venezuelan right to the status quo, the catastrophic errors of the Maduro regime, and her ability to embrace the three great popular aspirations of the present: wage dignity (the current monthly minimum wage is less than a dollar) in line with the regional average, the return of migrants for family reunification, and freedom of opinion and organization for the vast majority who live off of work. However, when we review her 2023 government program, we find that these banners, when they touch on the interests of capital, are diluted or absent from its content, so her leadership is built on a clear ideological foundation. It is real leadership, denying it does not contribute to political analysis or the construction of alternatives, although as Fernando Mires says “MCM was the leader of a pluri-social and pluri-ideological national movement, which today has been converted into a pro-Trump movement… that instead of adding forces, has subtracted” (red X, 10/13/2025).
Over the past two years, Machado has emerged as the undisputed leader of a significant portion of the Venezuelan opposition. In the opposition primaries for the July 28, 2024, presidential elections, she garnered overwhelming support (93%) from voters. This occurred before she was disqualified by the Maduro administration, effectively preventing her from running as a presidential candidate. She consequently acted as campaign manager for Edmundo González Urrutia, the opposition’s so-called «front candidate» for the June 28, 2024 elections.
For the first time in 25 years, a right-wing candidate achieved significant support, not only among traditional opposition sectors but also among popular and leftist sectors that were tired of Maduro’s authoritarianism and the elimination of democratic channels for the selection of representatives. Machado not only embodies an opposition—to both Chavismo and Madurismo—but also a bourgeois political project aligned with transnational capital, with geopolitical significance, that seeks to exercise institutional and state leadership if conditions were right.
María Corina Machado has clear roots in the traditional Venezuelan bourgeoisie. Her business family goes way back: Electricidad de Caracas and other empires. She has built a public image based on merit, individual effort, business values, and a model family, in contrast to what is described as clientelism, networks of favoritism, and state corruption, which are seen as central to the Venezuelan rentier model.
Her leadership is not based on strongly institutionalized party structures, but rather on vulnerable social organizations, civil society groups, and a high degree of personalism, a kind of «caudillismo.» During the years of Chavismo and Maduro, Machado has been a recurring figure in the opposition, often opting for insurrectional positions (attempts to overthrow the government, denouncing the dictatorship, etc.). One of the notable episodes was her participation in the 2004 recall referendum with the organization Súmate; it is reported that Súmate received funding from US entities, and Machado was accused of conspiracy, although without legal consequences.
As early as 2002, Machado had signed the «national salvation decree» during the coup against Chávez, on behalf of civil society. This episode serves to illustrate her early involvement in efforts to overthrow the institutional regime of Chavismo.
Her opposition is class-based; in fact, her government program (2023-2024), titled «Venezuela: Land of Grace. Liberty, Democracy, and Prosperity,» proposes a transition to a small state, a free market economy, private property, a reduction in the bureaucratic apparatus, meritocracy, liberal justice, and a guarantee for national and international private investment. She proposes a «national agreement» to overcome Maduro-Bolivarianism as a way to reset the Venezuelan social pact contained in the 1999 Constitution. One of the pillars of his proposal is federalism, understood as the decentralization of power, the distribution of resources to regions, the creation of spaces for regional capitalist accumulation, and overcoming the «imbalance of central control» to build new power relations based on capital.
In the paper we co-authored with Bracamonte (2024), six pillars of her government program, announced in 2023, are highlighted, each with short-, medium-, and long-term measures. Among the political foundations for coexistence, she advocates the independence of branches of government, checks and balances, bureaucratic simplification, professionalization of the civil service, restoration of institutional balance, legitimization of the legislative and judicial branches, and restoration of legal guarantees.
Regarding the restructuring of the State, she points out the need to downsize the State in accordance with the neoliberal model, reorganize the federal system, digitize administrative processes («E-gov»), establish a meritocratic civil service career, and retrain public workers who «want» to submit to the new management model.
To stabilize the economy, she proposes a stable economic and financial framework, respect for private property, separation from public ties that regulate foreign exchange and financing, fiscal adjustments, agreements with international organizations such as the IMF/WB, debt-for-asset swaps, privatization of state-owned companies (including PDVSA) and essential public services.
Her economic, social, and cultural development strategy calls for comprehensive health plans, education with a technical and scientific emphasis (STEM), educational vouchers, curricular reforms to eliminate the Bolivarian ideology, a social security system with private components, labor flexibility, and a commitment to inclusion based on private property and the market.
She advocates for so-called sustainable development based on a green economy through the promotion of clean energy, green businesses compatible with private investment, regulatory formalization of extractive sectors, and the replacement of public debt with green initiatives.
In foreign policy, her efforts focus on the return of migration, based on the recovery of the country’s role in the international division of labor inherent in neoliberal globalization. Her pragmatic approach to international relations is based on the professionalization of the foreign service (a new bureaucracy trained to follow the logic of capital) and its integration into international organizations such as the OECD, which will allow it to attract foreign investment.
The opposition’s primary campaign gave her visibility and legitimacy. Despite her disqualification, her messages, tour of the country, and her hopeful rhetoric grew in resonance. She built an image of herself as a victim due to the government’s clumsy actions (denial of registration, disqualifications, restrictions on his movement within the country). This narrative strengthened her leadership. She managed to capture support not only from traditional right-wing sectors, but also from broader sectors that previously supported Maduro, including people hit hard by sanctions, migrants, and popular sectors who feel the deterioration of services and the economy.
Although Machado presents an explicit neoliberal project, many of these ideas were not widely discussed during the campaign, which made it easier for her real program to remain largely hidden, or at least poorly publicized. In fact, publicly, she does not clearly address the popular demands of the working class, unions, labor protests, or social rights: her emphasis is more on legal guarantees for the market, property, and a small state. Social policies appear more as promises or publicity stunts.
Machado fails to acknowledge the existence or role of the «new bourgeoisie,» speaking only of corrupt individuals, as if the old bourgeoisie had not been built on the assault on oil revenues. This inability to engage in dialogue with the new bourgeoisie limits her ability to build a broad inter-bourgeois agreement, which hinders her intention to foster an orderly transition of power. Her discursive radicalism — insurrectionism, frontal opposition, and a hardline stance toward Maduro’s regime — earns her support, but also creates margins of political conflict that pose risks in terms of institutional stability or political dialogue. Therein lies her most significant Achilles’ heel, because she sides with one of the bourgeois sectors in dispute, hindering the possibility of political and economic stabilization.
Machado has strong ties to the old Venezuelan bourgeoisie (businessmen, owners of the means of production). She also has connections with foreign capital and international and diplomatic organizations. Invitations, awards, and external recognition are part of her career.
In 2005, María Corina Machado and George W. Bush met publicly to unveil a shared agenda on democracy and human rights, the domestic political situation, the future of bilateral relations between the United States and Venezuela, and the geopolitics of oil. Twenty years later, it seems that the agreements reached at that meeting are being finalized.
The US and other international powers are eyeing her leadership with interest, albeit with caution, as a possible transition option. A transition led by Machado and her alliance (MCM-EGU) would have to deal with contradictions between her neoliberal program and popular social expectations. Its success would depend on her ability to build a broader consensus, negotiate with other factions of the bourgeoisie, including the new bourgeoisie, and manage social tensions, something that seems unlikely. However, the Maduro regime’s clumsiness in handling the domestic situation and international relations — even within the progressive bloc with Boric, Lula, Petro, and the late Pepe Mujica — has opened up the imperial temptation to force a transition.
María Corina Machado represents not only an electoral opposition to Maduro’s regime, but also an ideological-military-institutional project of explicit neoliberal continuity with the shift in that direction brought about by Maduro’s regime, but also of integration into the illiberal forms currently promoted by the Trump administration. The MCM’s program is based on the interests of the old bourgeoisie, transnational capital, the free market, and the reduction of the state. MCM’s political practice seeks the liquidation of the new bourgeoisie. Her leadership has a concrete material basis: the social emergency of millions who have suffered material deterioration, the effects of sanctions, inflation, and migration during the Maduro administration (2014-2025). Machado becomes a representative of this discontent, albeit with a program that seeks to rescue the interests of capital, not social rights. The illusion that Machado, if she came to power, would represent a progressive or democratic solution for the popular sectors is deceptive: her project has real fundamental differences with social justice initiatives and is embedded in the logic of bourgeois restoration in the transition from neoliberalism to illiberalism.
The crisis preceding the 2025 Nobel Prize
Since 1983, Venezuela has been experiencing a structural crisis of the rentier bourgeois accumulation model — based on oil, extractivism and imports — and of political representation — which emerged in 1958 — from which it has not been able to emerge despite neoliberal recipes (CAP, 1988), the popular rebellion (1989), the military uprisings (4F and 27N, 1992), the broad-based government (Caldera, 1994), the Chavista period (1999-2013) and the aegis of Maduro (2013-2025).
The onset of the national crisis coincided with the arrival of neoliberal globalization, the financialization of the global economy, and the rise of technopolitics as a substitute for global ideological premises. This combination of local and international factors necessitated the need for a new model of bourgeois accumulation that combined local and international capital, concrete investment with speculative financialization based on oil revenues, as well as a new model of partisan mediation that would overcome Fordist premises and social security models and liberalize relations between social classes. This implied not only the emergence of new political paradigms but also the creation of a new generation of leadership, something that would not be passively accepted by those who had held power. To top it all off, the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, parasitic due to its rentier form of accumulation, lacked sufficient experience to enter the competitive international market promoted by globalization, which exacerbated the crisis.
The singular effort made by Chavismo (1999-2013) to overcome the crisis based on a social agenda and the democratization of wealth — which never became an anti-capitalist revolution, but had progressive elements in that sense — collided with the emergence of a new bourgeoisie, with its own class interests, which in the period 2013-2025 halted and dissolved the accumulated radicalism.
Chávez’s candidacy (1996-1998) implied a call for the development of a humane capitalism, a third way, one that would overcome the dominance of the old bourgeoisie, not eliminate it; therefore, sectors of the old bourgeoisie — represented by Miquilena and others — supported him until the 2002 coup d’état. From that moment on, the Bolivarian Revolution experienced a duality that would mark its dramatic outcome. On the one hand, the push for a popular, communal national project, building popular power — albeit always led and controlled by the party — as well as so-called 21st-century socialism (starting in 2025); and on the other, the emergence of a new bourgeoisie fueled by the old rentier, import-based model. The rise in oil prices would contribute to this dual direction, fostering a new form of polyclassism.
The 2009-2010 financial crisis in Venezuela, which involved key figures of Chavismo, now bank owners, demonstrated that the neo-bourgeois project was underway. Between 2009 and 2012, the growing, albeit low-intensity, confrontation between the two paths of the Bolivarian process, the communal and the bourgeois, became obvious. Chávez, who aspired to be the mediator between the two — some say his strategic bet would be in favor of the national popular movement, but there is no way to verify this — fell ill and ended up dying, giving way to a sudden or contingent succession (Maduro) who lacked the leadership or the internal balance of power to continue sustaining the mediating threads inherent in a multi-class mass project.
Therefore, Maduro’s rise to power inaugurates a new phase: Madurismo, which champions the supremacy of the neo-bourgeois program, the subordination and subsequent liquidation of the popular national communal project. Twenty-first-century socialism is reduced to a slogan, which maintains the solidarity of sectors of the international left unable to grasp the structural crisis of Venezuelan rentier capitalism, but which internally becomes a terminator of the real possibilities of socialism among the masses. For ordinary citizens, twenty-first-century socialism comes to be represented by authoritarianism, the lack of political freedoms, the unprecedented deterioration of material living conditions, the fracture of families due to the explosion of economic migration, and the loss of hope in the state’s role as guarantor of basic rights. The damage Madurismo does to the possibilities of a socialist alternative to the Venezuelan crisis is enormous, and its consequences are still unpredictable.
Maduro’s government is a form of government guided by the new bourgeoisie, emerging after the 2002 coup d’état. In the absence of a strong leader like Chávez’s, Maduro’s government builds a diffuse identity based on internal power relations, with various leaderships serving under the central leadership. But those who fail to recognize Maduro’s ability to construct his own form of leadership and make it functional to sustaining power are mistaken. His weakness has turned into strength around what he calls a civil-military-police alliance.
Maduro’s administration has had three major moments. The first, between 2013 and 2017, focused on dissolving the remnants of the old bourgeoisie’s political representation, intervening — primarily indirectly — in right-wing political parties and forcefully repressing street revolts driven by that political sector, with a worrying impact on human rights (especially in 2017). At the same time, it managed to fragment the political right, clearly forming the camp of the so-called «alacranes» (scorpions), sectors of the right that claimed to remain in opposition to the government but were negotiating — now more than ever — behind the scenes with it. The fraction of the old bourgeoisie that escaped — and resisted — this assimilation was represented by María Corina Machado (MCM), who had been a minority leader in the sympathies of the opposition electorate (2%-5%), but who began to emerge in that period as the only real right-wing opposition.
During this period, Maduro’s government isolated individual leaders within the PSUV and the government who sought to uphold the Chavista government’s agenda (Giordani, Navarro, Márquez, and others), while simultaneously alienating key figures in the Chavista model of accumulation and multi-class leadership (Ramírez, Rodríguez Torres, among others). This constructed Maduro’s government as a sector with its own identity, distinct from its core group, Chavismo.
The second phase of Maduro’s administration occurred in the 2018-2024 period, during which he prioritized subjugating the left, which was beginning to distance itself from his political orientation (PPT, Tupamaros, Redes, PCV, and others). The abandonment of the social agenda was justified by the implementation of unilateral coercive measures (UCM), which had a significant impact starting in 2017. While they significantly affected the country’s income, they were insufficient to explain the devastating impact on the national popular and social justice program that had been at the center of politics during the Chavista period. The monthly minimum wage — which serves as a pension indicator for some five million people — has fallen, reaching unprecedented levels of almost half a US dollar per month, while the average salary stands at $15-$20 per month. The granting of extra-salary bonuses — about $120 a month — doesn’t even come close to offsetting the widespread inflation that places basic goods and services at a price two or three times higher than the Latin American average. Remittances sent by the eight million migrants manage to mitigate the plight of survival for those who remain in the country. The money from the sale of assets such as houses, cars, and land owned by the middle class and professionals is used for daily subsistence, creating a new model of property accumulation at depreciated real estate market prices.
In 2018, the Maduro government issued Decree 3332, which reformed the Organic Labor Law, limiting the right to strike and collective bargaining agreements. It also issued Memorandum 2792, an unprecedented blow to the labor market, paving the way for a dramatic reduction in the cost of the Venezuelan workforce. All this occurred alongside judicial interventions against all left-wing parties and the persecution of union and social leaders, resulting in a significant authoritarian shift under the Maduro regime.
During this period, negotiations began with the US administration, initially secret and then public. This rapprochement aimed to rebuild relations with the US imperialist power, using oil as a bargaining chip to overcome the effects of the MCU. To this end, it sought to present itself as a government capable of fostering a meeting between the old and new bourgeoisie, restoring bourgeois order and thus opening a new era of governability.
Several obstacles face this initiative. First, the accumulation model of the new bourgeoisie remained rentier, import-oriented, and extractive—just like that of the old bourgeoisie — which meant that the constituent elements of the local capitalist structural crisis that began in 1983 had not been overcome. The United States is not interested in repeating the model of economic and trade relations with Venezuela typical of the bourgeois liberal period, but rather is committed to a combination of neoliberal and illiberal relations that allow for greater rent capture and the transfer of the effects of its structural crises to the capitalist periphery. Despite a public and well-known agreement between the Maduro regime and the FEDECAMARAS employers’ association, there remains a rebellious sector of the old bourgeoisie that favors the total liberalization of the economy and claims to be represented by María Corina Machado.
Second, the Maduro shift has significantly eroded its social and electoral base, limiting its ability to effectively mediate within a framework of democratic freedoms. Indeed, the increase in oil revenues following the war in Ukraine marked a brutal transfer of resources to the financial bourgeoisie — a form of exchange control — as well as to schemes of accumulation through imports, speculation, and corruption itself (such as the case of PDVSA crypto), but it did not improve the material living conditions of the working class or restore wages.
Third, while the Biden administration appeared to be following this Maduro-backed course of action — especially since the war in Ukraine, with Venezuela’s return as a reliable source of oil supply — the Trump administration is betting on placing the Venezuela issue within the United States’ neocolonial repositioning agenda in the region.
Fourth, by limiting the possibility of a left-wing alternative to Maduro, as well as co-opting a significant portion of the right (the scorpions), Maduro has ended up strengthening the legitimacy of María Corina Machado’s leadership, who has emerged as the true representative of the opposition to Maduro. Maduro’s clumsiness in attacking the left, which could be a balancing factor that would even allow it to negotiate on better terms, demonstrates the ideological identity of the new bourgeoisie with the sector of the old bourgeoisie that opposes it.
For both the old and new bourgeoisie, the essential thing is to promote polarization, which would eliminate any project of a popular, national, or authentic socialist nature. The Maduro-MCM polarization benefits the Maduro regime and the United States because it contributes to warding off any possibility of a radical and authentically anti-imperialist solution, while maintaining control of a bourgeois solution to the Venezuelan crisis.
The third moment of Maduroism begins with the elections of July 28, 2024. Maduro was aware that the disaster generated by his political agenda had allowed the entire opposition to his administration to coalesce around María Corina Machado, but he considered the emergence of a mass pole to his left less dangerous, as that would jeopardize the interests of the new bourgeoisie he represents. It is not true that the Venezuelan electorate shifted to the right; rather, the impossibility of constructing an electoral reference point distinct from the polarization that served Maduro’s agenda and the United States meant that large sectors of voters who opposed the government’s structural adjustment package had no choice but to vote for the only option that appeared viable and clearly opposed what was happening. Even a sector of the left was trapped in this illusion, deserting it only when it faced the US military threat against Venezuela. The electorate’s distrust of other right-wing and centrist political options, mostly infiltrated by Maduro’s government through the political scorpion, unfairly affected even those organizations with evident degrees of freedom from Maduro’s government, such as those represented by Enrique Márquez and his centrist party.
In this third phase, Maduro’s government has attempted to reach an agreement with the United States based on Venezuela’s oil and mineral resources. The problem is that time seems to have run out, because now Trump’s illiberal agenda and the emergence of a new capitalist world order demand a new role for Venezuela in this reconfiguration.
Trump unleashes storm in the Caribbean
The Trump administration is working toward imperial repositioning in the region. In that sense, Venezuela plays a pivotal role in its strategy. Everything seems to indicate that Trump, unlike Biden — who advocated letting things happen as long as the United States obtained Venezuelan oil — wants territorial, political, and military control of Venezuela, to use it as an example of his strategy of illiberal ideological hegemony and neo-anti-communism.
To this end, he follows a clear path. First, knowing that the Maduro regime is in the process of showing itself to be subservient to US interests, he accuses Maduro and the Maduro leadership of being drug traffickers — the Cartel of the Suns — aiming not to integrate but to weaken the Venezuelan government, taking advantage of the Maduro regime’s vacillations to build an even more favorable situation for the North.
Second, by promoting the image of Maduro’s regime as drug traffickers — albeit without objective evidence—it seeks to portray progressivism as a sector in the throes of criminal degeneration and acts as a diluent for potential anti-US resistance to any kind of military intervention. Anti-invasion resistance is beginning to be portrayed as the remnants of criminal gangs.
Third, by deploying vessels, equipment, and combat troops to the Caribbean, it demonstrates its regional military supremacy, pushing for a transition of power in Venezuela with the lowest possible cost and significant regional geopolitical impact. It seeks, first and foremost, to create divisions within the Maduro regime, facilitating its displacement from power by internal military leaders, thus opening the door to a Grenada scenario (an internal coup d’état and subsequent US military intervention).
Fourth, it disproportionately attacks fishing boats, accusing them of being part of drug trafficking logistics, to accustom regional public opinion to open military operations with collateral damage in terms of human lives.
Fifth, it promotes the succession of María Corina Machado — directly or initially through Edmundo González — as a government that would pave the way for an illiberal solution to the structural crisis that began in 1983. The United States is aware that a potential government led by María Corina Machado would be unstable because her economic and political measures would quickly lead to a loss of popularity and make her mandate unstable, jeopardizing US interests. Knowing that MCM has repeatedly stated that it will request support, including military support, from the United States, the US strategic objective appears to be to promote her rise to power, paving the way for a «Haitian situation» in which the government’s instability would lead MCM to request foreign occupation of the territory, enabling the establishment of permanent military bases in Venezuela to guarantee more direct control of the oil reserves. After that, MCM would become an expendable piece on the US chessboard.
Sixth, criminalizing potential resistance to this course of events would require the continued maintenance of a state of emergency in Venezuela (following the U.S. military attack), something that fits perfectly into Trump’s illiberal political agenda. This would seek to prevent the regrouping of progressive, democratic, and leftist forces, warding off the danger of a revolution in Venezuela.
Therefore, the awarding of the Nobel Prize to María Corina Machado must be seen as part of an imperialist strategy to gain much more direct control over Venezuela’s wealth.
The tragedy of Maduro’s regime is that the only way to survive in power would be to resume the national popular agenda it decided to bury in 2014, abandon the bourgeois Bonapartist program it sought to implement in 2018, and develop a real, not merely a declarative, anti-imperialism. Indeed, Maduro’s regime correctly denounces the deployment of US warships in the Caribbean, but it hides the growing number of oil tankers that sail daily across Lake Maracaibo carrying crude oil to the United States, whose sale takes place under neocolonial conditions worse than those prevailing before Chávez came to power. However, taking five steps back from Maduro’s neo-bourgeois program would limit its capacity to accumulate wealth, opening up scenarios for internal crises within that bourgeois bloc. Furthermore, a return to the national popular agenda would frighten both the new and old bourgeoisie.
The dilemma seems to lie in Maduro’s ability to build a real internal balance of power that would make the Americans more cautious, something that is not foreseeable through any other means than a return to the Chavista program. This takes on the character of a dramatic emergency, starting on October 15, 2025, when the New York Times announces that the Trump administration has authorized the CIA to begin destabilizing operations in Venezuelan territory, for the start of a transition to the government of María Corina Machado, now a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. This announcement should call on all progressive and anti-imperialist forces to denounce and carry out mass actions that seek to stop the attack on continental national sovereignty; the attack on Venezuela is an attack on the entire region.
Why award the Nobel Prize to MCM at this time?
There are several geopolitical reasons for awarding the Nobel Prize to María Corina Machado. The first is to consolidate her local and international leadership, protecting it from the erosion caused by the lack of political solutions following the June 28, 2024, elections, especially due to the restructuring that the Maduro regime has been undertaking with parliamentary and regional elections in which it secured an apparent majority.
Second, repolarize the Venezuelan political debate. Nothing is more dangerous for the United States and the Venezuelan bourgeoisies—of the Fourth and Fifth Republics — than, in the face of disenchantment with the lack of resolution to the terrible situation generated by Maduro’s regime and the impossibility of materializing an orderly transition in the interests of capital, for a mass movement to emerge independent of bourgeois and imperialist interests. In fact, over the last year, the social fabric of resistance to the various forms of neoliberalism and illiberalism has been significantly rebuilt, although it has not yet taken the form of a mass movement. The Nobel Prize for MCM seeks to repolarize the debate between Maduro’s regime and María Corina Machado’s faction, narrowing the space for the construction of an alternative that is not aligned with the objectives of the White House and the Pentagon.
Third, ensure that the agenda of a transitional government — or even a continuing one — is one of neocolonial dependence on the United States. The US administration has little interest in the fate of the Venezuelan people; it simply uses them as a negotiable piece on the imperial power scale.
Fourth, given the possibility of the United States launching direct intelligence and military operations on Venezuelan soil, it is important to present its intervention as an action in support of regional peace and in support of the leadership of a Norwegian Peace Prize laureate. Even the imprisonment or physical disappearance of MCM during this course of events would serve as further justification for US military intervention in Venezuela.
In this sense, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize is part of the strategy to consolidate the role of the United States in the region.
The tasks of revolutionaries
This is a difficult time for those who embody the anti-capitalist struggle in Venezuela. Without a doubt, denouncing any attempt at a US attack or invasion of Venezuela is at the forefront of political positioning and action. But this cannot generate hope that the survival of Maduro’s neo-bourgeois regime will allow for the development of a government that facilitates the two conditions necessary for change from the perspective of the working class: improved material living conditions and political freedoms to organize in unions and leftist parties, allowing them to work, express opinions, and mobilize with broad guarantees. This duality poses the challenge of building an anti-imperialism beyond the geopolitical, an anti-imperialism rooted in the reality of those who live off their work. Can it be achieved?
A potential government of María Corina Machado would not only sustain the anti-popular agenda initiated by the Maduro regime but would deepen it. In fact, María Corina Machado has not said that her coming to power would mean returning to the right of workers to freely organize in unions, the right to strike, and the mobilization of the working class. Instead, she has spoken of an illiberal structural adjustment program that would allow a way out of the bourgeois crisis that began in 1983 through market-driven solutions.
So, who should we support? This is the question often asked in the face of Venezuela’s confusing situation. The answer can only be the working class and its interests. Without it, any anti-imperialism is empty and serves only the bourgeois reorganization of Venezuela.