“There is no way to peace, peace is the way” wrote Mahatma Gandhi. Perhaps he was referring specifically to India’s path to independence, which it achieved through pacifism. It’s not that their fight hasn’t caused deaths. He caused them but they were all from his own people, because his strategy did not include violently attacking the British or their native vassals. In any case, having been the promoter of “non-violence” and “peaceful resistance” should have earned him a Nobel Peace Prize, but they never gave it to him. Something as controversial as so many distinctions given to leaders who waged wars.
The Nobel Prize that has just been awarded to María Corina Machado is also controversial. There are voices in Latin America and Europe questioning that distinction. The most heard argument considers it absurd to reward those who are asking the United States to invade their country to remove the Maduro regime by military means. They also question distinguishing by pacifism a leader who so many times called on the military to carry out a coup d’état.
By the way, there is reason for the controversy. The issue is that they are the same voices that said nothing when the opposition won the legislative elections and the regime responded with an institutional vasectomy: so that it does not seem like what it was, a self-coup, the National Assembly continued to function but the laws they enacted never came into force. Congress was open, legislators deliberated and received their salaries, but the Executive Branch annulled everything they enacted.
María Corina Machado has not been and is not a pacifist. Neither have the leaders who won that award after having waged wars. What those who question the distinction of the anti-Chavista leader do not say is that she has been trying for years, in addition to coups d’état, to end the dictatorship through institutional means. And it has not achieved this, precisely because it is a dictatorship.
Normally, those who denounce Machado do not talk about the ideological persecution, the hundreds of deaths left by the repression of recurrent mass protests, the prisons filled with political prisoners and the systematic application of torture in detention centers such as Ramo Verde and El Helicoide, as denounced by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights before it was directed by Michel Bachelet, under the leadership of the former Chilean socialist president and also after her management in that arm of the UN.
They have criticized more that they gave the Nobel to Machado than to the rogue dictatorship that destroyed the economy of a country that floats on oil and generated a diaspora of biblical dimensions, in addition to persecuting, imprisoning, torturing, repressing and killing on industrial scales. With Hugo Chávez alive, Machado’s merit was to confront him and tell him to his face what no one dared to tell him. But she was a recalcitrant conservative with a notable inability to unite the different leaders and political parties that were seeing and denouncing the beginning of the dissolution of democracy in the shadow of the exuberant Caribbean leader.
She prioritized imposing her own position and leadership over the need to unify the center-left and center-right. Furthermore, she was more right-wing than center-right. That is why it did not contribute anything to the understanding between Henrique Capriles, Leopoldo López, Antonio Ledesma, Juan Guaidó and others. Strictly speaking, none of them contributed much to finding the unity of the democratic forces, which made things easier for Chávez to go from democracy to majoritarianism, that is, the regime in which the leader has the support of the majority, but dominates and excludes minorities. And after his death, we went from majoritarianism to the dictatorship of a corrupt minority. María Corina Machado has grown in recent years. His merit was having confronted Maduro without giving up, until causing him such an immense defeat at the polls that the dictatorship had no way of camouflaging it with fraud.
First he organized open primaries in which he obtained more than two million votes. As the regime knew that in the 2024 election, it would defeat Nicolás Maduro, it banned it. But instead of giving up, she pulled a card out of her sleeve: she put an unknown academic, Corina Yoris, as a candidate, but with two traits that would make her beat Maduro. The first being a woman on a single ballot where all the others were men and false opposition candidates. On that ballot, Maduro’s photo appeared a dozen times. A ballot made for the dictator to win, but a single woman, who was also called Corina, would be the clear signal that would guide the voters.
When the regime realized this, it also banned Corina Yoris. But Machado did not give up either and pulled another card out of her sleeve: an old diplomat whom she took to her side on a box mounted on a truck with which she toured all of Venezuela. She always dresses the same, with tight jeans and a white t-shirt with the country’s flag on one sleeve. This is how he managed to make González Urrutia known, the candidate they should vote for because he was the only true opponent of Maduro on that cheating ballot.
He succeeded, and the avalanche of votes was so great that it prevented credible fraud. There was no way to draw scrutiny. Not even the experts sent by the Chinese government could prepare minutes to show. Venezuela and the world saw the most blatant theft of an election. The most grotesque fraud in memory was exposed thanks to the courage and cunning with which María Corina Machado acted. Nobody dared so much against the dictatorship.
If a North American invasion or attacks from the sea occur, rather than blaming her, those who question the Nobel should blame the Maduro dictatorship. Before criticizing the Norwegian committee, they should criticize leaders like Lula, Petro, López Obrador and Sheinbaum, among others, for having done nothing to force the regime to respect the popular will expressed in 2024. By not having questioned any of those who made this unpresentable fraud possible by action or omission, they lack the moral authority to question María Corina Machado’s Nobel Prize.
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