
Venezuelan far-right opposition leader Maria Corina Machado. Photo: Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters.

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Venezuelan far-right opposition leader Maria Corina Machado. Photo: Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters.
By Jorge Vilalta – Oct 25, 2025
Humanity is witnessing its darkest and most difficult hour since the Second World War. A scenario in which the protagonists of that past tragedy, the fascists, are re-surging. The United States has lost its absolute control of the world but is dispensing its military, political, cultural and communicational power over the American countries. It operates a systemic apparatus for lying en-masse, manipulating [what Gramsci referred to as] common sense and misleading humanity. The appointment of María Corina Machado Zuloaga as the Nobel Peace Prize recipient is just another move in this direction.
María Corina Machado Zuloaga, commonly referred to as Maricori, is a representative and spokesperson for the most violent and extremist section of the bourgeoisie in Venezuela. Daughter of businessman Enrique Machado Zuloaga and psychologist Corina Parisca, Machado was born in Caracas in 1967. Educated in the most exclusive and excluding schools and universities in Venezuela (Academia Merici, UCAB, IESA), she then received additional training in the United States specifically for political leaders in academies of the Yankee establishment, such as Yale University. She was married to another representative of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie with whom she had three children, none of whom have lived in Venezuela for at least six years.
The only public office that Machado has held in Venezuela was that of deputy of the Republic, which she won in 2010 in the state of Miranda. Subsequently in 2012 she launched herself as a presidential candidate in the primary elections held among the opposition Venezuelan opposition – losing that election by gaining just 3.8 percent. Her political career and recent rise in public exposure do not correspond to her contribution to the development of Venezuela, nor to her work, talents or experience as a politician, but to Washington’s interest in creating a fictional character – another one – to carry out their orders in our country.
Politically, Machado is located on the extreme right, allied to the most reactionary elements of imperialism and national and international Zionism. While she does not seem to know what her ideology truly is, or at least she does not want to say it, nor what her political or economic program would consist of, the Vente Venezuela Party communications [which Machado leads] claim they are “the party of freedom (…) closing populist or totalitarian cycles.” That is, they have no specific ideology or have not even thought about it. Their only goal is to end Chavismo.
In other communications, we find that Vente Venezuela defines itself as a “liberal” party and Machado in 2011 said she believed in “popular capitalism” (?) a non-existent theoretical concept, copied from the Chilean dictator and perpetrator of genocide Augusto Pinochet and the ultra-conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher. This is simply an effort by Machado’s team to position the billionaire heir as representing something “popular.”
To understand a person, it is necessary to know their ancestors and origin. That’s why we talked to Ociel Alí López, sociologist and author of the book Dale más gasolina: Chavismo, Sifrinismo y burocracia, who explained that “(…) María Corina’s family are the Machado Zuloaga’s. They arrived in Venezuela with the Guipuzcoana company [in the port of La Guaira] in 1777. This company had a commercial monopoly, administering the goods of all the provinces in Venezuela and its trade with the world. It was also at the centre of several independence uprisings (…) the Machado Zuloaga’s are one of the ‘masters of the valley’, that is, one of the twelve richest families in Venezuela, who were slaveholders and who have not recognised nor disowned their past. They were landowners, they always lived on the latifundios [large unproductive tracts of land that are increasing in value over time]. This family also had a monopoly on electricity and owned Caracas Electricity, as well as steel companies. Both sectors were nationalised by Hugo Chávez and the family’s companies were expropriated, which is why María Corina’s family has such a strong fight [against Chavismo].
Iley Sosa, a 38-year-old resident of a lively area in the center of Caracas who graduated in Environmental Management and is the mother of a young girl, tells us that “what María Corina has done is travel [with the money stolen from the State] to defame the Venezuelan people. She has sought problems, sanctions and is leading us to a conflict [with the United States]. With everything [she has done], with the guarimbas [violent street protests], she has not been able to win the presidency; this is because almost no one believes her, she is a liar and has no plan for the country. For me, she is a symbol of destabilisation, of the coup d’état that shook the country. I think she is a person with mental problems because one cannot explain how you can ask someone to invade your country, seeing how ugly and grotesque a war is. No conscious person is going to ask the gringos to invade us. Sovereignty has to be respected; politics is precisely to resolve conflicts without wars.”
Another view comes from Carolina Blanco, a retired university educator who is sixty-five years old and lives in a middle-class sector in the southwest of the capital. She says that María Corina Machado “is the reflection of an imperialist policy who desperately seeks to show herself as a valid option, masking her true intentions to dominate the nation’s riches. Unfortunately (…) a part of the population is being deceived by this false ‘libertor’, as she calls herself.”
So Machado is a bourgeois descendant of slaveholders, landowners and exploiters; she holds a hatred and disgust towards poor people and is rejected by sections of the population; she has no major contributions to the political or daily life of the Venezuelan people and leads a small and irrelevant party.
Machado’s criminality
María Corina Machado also has a record of serious criminal acts in Venezuela. She has never recognised or faced justice for them, and the mainstream media has tried hard to hide them. Below is a chronological summary of these events, meticulously prepared by ALBA Movimientos:
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to María Corina Machado is part of the plan of global capitalism in its current fascistic phase, which demands that Venezuela hands over its resources and independence. It is the Global North contributing to destabilisation and interference in the Global South.
Irene Echezuría, a 62 year-old who lives and works in a textile store in Petare, Miranda state, the largest neighborhood in the country, says “that lady has not brought anything good for the Venezuelan people, she is with the gringos who want to invade us to take everything and they walk like vampires looking for our natural resources… but as they say around here, they can enter here, but then leave? Who knows…”. For the vast majority of the working class in Venezuela, even those who do not identify as Chavista, there is no CNN, Instagram, Hollywood or Nobel that justify a war. Venezuela is for peace.
Note: This article first appeared in Spanish on Ceiba. Red Spark translated the article to English (abridged).
Jorge Vilalta is a Venezuelan activist, Chavista and contributing editor of Ceiba: periodismo con memoria.