United States, María Corina Machado, and the War Lobby Against Venezuela

By Misión Verdad – Oct 13, 2025

During the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) held in late September, the Venezuelan far-right opposition, led by María Corina Machado, intensified its diplomatic and media efforts to promote “regime” change in Venezuela, with the explicit goal of ousting President Nicolás Maduro.

These actions constitute an international lobbying campaign coordinated with sectors of the Trump administration and with clear corporate interests aiming for Venezuela’s vast natural resources, particularly its oil, gas, and mineral reserves, which are among the largest in the world.

Machado, a far-right politician with over two decades of opposition activism—specifically coup-mongering, for which she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize—has modeled her political ideology on figures such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and has openly embraced a so-called economic doctrine once dubbed “popular capitalism,” originally implemented by Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, the first formal experiment in savage neoliberalism in South America.

It is a program that promotes the total privatization of Venezuela’s strategic sectors, including the oil and mining industries, which in Venezuela are controlled by the state through publicly owned companies such as PDVSA.

Machado has repeatedly promised that in a “free Venezuela,” US oil, gas, and mining companies would have absolute priority in exploiting these resources, which constitutes a direct offer to hand over the nation’s wealth in exchange for international political support and, in particular, Washington’s backing for her personal ascent to state power.

Let us remember that in June she offered Venezuela to US entrepreneurs for “a trillion dollars.”

False pretexts
Canadian journalist Joseph Bouchard reported that during the UNGA, the Venezuelan opposition organized protests in front of the UN Secretariat building, where Pedro de Mendonça, press director for Machado’s campaign, accused President Maduro of being the “head of the Cartel de los Soles and the Tren de Aragua,” labels that have been used as justification for a possible foreign military intervention.

These allegations lack any foundation. Even InSight Crime—funded by the US State Department—has denied the existence of the “Cartel de los Soles” as an organized criminal structure under Maduro’s control.

Nevertheless, these narratives have been weaponized by the Trump administration, especially by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Attorney General Pam Bondi, to label the Venezuelan government as “narco-terrorist” and “illegitimate,” labels that serve as a legal pretext to justify military operations in the Caribbean and extraterritorial sanctions.

Machado, as we already know, does not act in a vacuum but is part of a network of institutions and actors linked to the US political and economic establishment. She has collaborated with entities such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—an institution from which she received a formal congratulation for the Nobel Prize—and the International Republican Institute (IRI), all of which have a history of intervening in the internal affairs of Latin American countries.

Additionally, she was a member of the Yale World Fellows program, which reinforces her connections with US academic and political elites.

Her close ties to the George W. Bush administration and her involvement in the failed 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez, during which she signed the “Carmona Decree” that dissolved the National Assembly and suspended the Constitution, demonstrate a track record marked by the promotion of “solutions by force” over peaceful ones or political compromise.

Bouchard’s article mentions that in parallel with Machado’s activities, Juan Guaidó—the self-proclaimed “interim president” backed by the US between 2019 and 2023—also met with Trump administration officials during the UNGA to promote “anti-drug operations” in Venezuela, another way to legitimize the US military presence in the country.

Both Machado and Guaidó have systematically spread the same narrative on social media and international media outlets portraying Maduro as a criminal and terrorist dictator in order to build a global public opinion in favor of US intervention.

However, these protests and campaigns are not organic: they are orchestrated by US power circles, hawkish think tanks, and corporations interested in accessing Venezuelan resources. Due to their complete lack of support within Venezuelan society, the extremist wing of the opposition perpetually resorts to the same US-made tactics that have failed to achieve their goal of ousting the government.

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The designation of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) as an international terrorist organization by the Trump administration in February 2025—based on the false claim that it operates with the support of the Maduro government—has served as additional justification for repressive measures, including mass deportations of Venezuelan migrants, violating every fundamental law imaginable.

The Department of Homeland Security has disseminated viral, dehumanizing videos on social media to promote these deportations, thereby contributing to a xenophobic and criminalizing narrative. Do such actions seek to combat drug trafficking or, rather, to consolidate a legal framework that would allow direct intervention in Venezuela along the lines of the justifications used to invade countries in the Middle East after 9/11?

The hypocrisy and contradiction of US foreign policy are glaring: while Trump and his allies demand Maduro’s ouster over alleged ties to drug trafficking, they have maintained trade and other agreements with the Venezuelan government, including the purchase of Venezuelan oil through Chevron and the coordination of deportation flights.

This double standard reflects that the real interests behind the campaign against Maduro are neither democracy nor security but control over Venezuela’s strategic resources. The country holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves, as well as significant deposits of gold, coltan, diamonds, and other minerals critical to the global technology and energy industries.

From the UN to the Pentagon
Machado’s proposal—to hand over the Venezuelan economy and resources to US corporations through the total privatization of basic industries—represents a return to neoliberal conditions and sets an agenda that would deepen economic dependence, inequality, and the loss of national sovereignty.

Furthermore, a military intervention or a US-backed coup would not only violate international law but would also repeat Washington’s historical mistakes in Latin America, where its actions have left a trail of dictatorships, violence, and plunder.

In summary, the Venezuelan opposition’s campaign at the UN was not a legitimate democratic movement: it was a corporate–political lobbying operation aimed at handing over Venezuela’s natural resources to US interests in exchange for the support needed to propel María Corina Machado into power. The Nobel Prize that she received sets a symbolic precedent in favor of her personal agenda, with business ramifications so “natural” to the ambitions of the magnate and current president of the United States.

This strategy, backed by Washington’s bellicose rhetoric, uses falsehoods about drug trafficking and terrorism to justify coercive measures that ultimately seek economic and geopolitical control over one of the world’s most resource-rich countries.

In that sense, the term “sepoy” is no longer merely a noun or adjective denoting the nominal—and existential—status of those opposition sectors whose sole aim is political and economic gain at the expense of the population, the territory, and Venezuela’s strategic resources.

Opposition? More like outsourcing: they offer the homeland as an investment package in exchange for a seat in Miraflores Palace.

(Misión Verdad)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

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