The recent awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to María Corina Machado has been celebrated by major Western media as a moral triumph for Venezuelan democracy. Yet the gesture reveals a contradiction that cannot be ignored: rarely has a Peace Prize been granted to someone who has so explicitly and consistently supported severe economic sanctions, extreme diplomatic pressure, and the need for a greater U.S. role in precipitating regime change — including, if necessary, by military means. This paradox is not a mistake by the committee but the symptom of a deeper conceptual shift: the identification of peace with the “proper” administration of coercion rather than with its suspension. As Michelle Ellner has critically argued in relation to Machado’s award [1], humanitarian language here functions as a vehicle for a politics of force.
The media construction that elevates Machado as a symbol of freedom is embedded in this conceptual shift. Editorials in The Washington Post [2], The Wall Street Journal [3], and the reporting in El País [4] reproduce, in unison, a Manichean narrative: on one side, the “darkness” of Chavismo; on the other, the moral clarity of the opposition leader. In these accounts, Nicolás Maduro appears reduced to an autocrat devoid of legitimacy or political rationality, while the complex geostrategic architecture that frames the conflict disappears from view.
To understand this mechanism, it is useful to recall the historical analogy reconstructed by Samuel Moyn in The Last Utopia [5] and Not Enough [6]. Moyn shows how, in the 1960s and 1970s, Western powers promoted human rights as a depoliticized moral vocabulary designed to weaken the egalitarian and sovereign aspirations of the Non-Aligned Movement. Individual ethics replaced emancipatory politics. Episodic denunciation substituted for the structural struggle for decolonization. In this way, the West neutralized the political force of the Global South under the appearance of a universal language.
A similar dynamic is at work today. In a world in which the BRICS emerge as a multipolar alternative — heirs, with all their ambiguities, to the earlier non-aligned aspiration — the liberal-neoliberal discourse of “freedom” becomes a new instrument for containing that expansion. The word “freedom” loses political density and becomes a civilizational principle serving Atlantic reordering. In this logic, sanctions, diplomatic sieges, and threats of intervention can be presented as instruments of a moral cause. Peace no longer signifies the suspension of violence; rather, it becomes the condition that follows from exerting the “right” kind of coercion.
The paradox of the Nobel awarded to Machado thus becomes transparent: the peace it celebrates is not the peace that suspends force, but the peace awaited at the end of punitive action. This is the logic analyzed by Moyn in Humane [7]: war does not disappear; it becomes humanized, moralized, made presentable.
This diagnosis contrasts with the analyses of Jeffrey Sachs [8] and John Mearsheimer [9], who restore the geostrategic scale of the conflict. Sachs reminds us that U.S. policy cannot be understood apart from its long history of interventions in Latin America and the strategic value of Venezuelan oil. The narrative of “narco-terrorism” or the defense of “democracy” conceals a struggle over resources, energy routes, and hemispheric control. Mearsheimer, from a realist perspective, concurs: the U.S. military deployment in the Caribbean responds to the need to contain the consolidation of the China-Russia axis and the expansion of the BRICS in the Western Hemisphere. In other words, U.S. policy toward Venezuela is not a domestic matter; it is an expression of the struggle over the global order.
The lengthy interview with Nicolás Maduro published by Ignacio Ramonet on 18 November 2025 in the Spanish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique [10] breaks with a persistent caricature. Not because it idealizes the president, but because it refuses to participate in the demonizing device that simplifies Venezuelan reality. Ramonet describes Maduro in a tone unusual in Western media: a leader who moves around the city with ease, meets with communal organizations, and insists on dialogue even under direct military threat. His account depicts a country that does not match the aesthetics of permanent collapse nor the fiction of a paralyzed society. And in doing so, it introduces a fundamental point: Venezuelan politics cannot be understood without considering the geostrategic encirclement that surrounds it.
The convergence between the liberal discourse of freedom and the demonization of Chavismo reveals the depth of the issue. As Moyn observes, moral language can function as a legitimating instrument for coercive projects. What presents itself as liberation can become the language of imperial reorganization. And Venezuela is not an isolated case. Governments such as Bukele’s in El Salvador or Milei’s in Argentina have embraced a foreign policy defined by unconditional subordination to Washington’s interests, even when such alignment contradicts the material interests of their own countries. The rhetoric of freedom operates as an ideological device that turns submission into virtue.
Returning to Moyn clarifies the decisive paradox: the peace invoked in the name of freedom is not the suspension of violence but the discursive form of a geopolitical project aimed at ensuring that Venezuela remains within the strategic perimeter of the United States. The minimal utopia — yesterday human rights, today freedom — serves to neutralize any attempt to reorganize the global order. And the narrative about Venezuela, taken as a whole, confirms this shift: the conflict cannot be understood without geopolitics, yet geopolitics disappears precisely where it most determines the course of events.
This reading, uncomfortable for many, is essential in restoring the conflict to its real scale: the struggle over the world to come, over the distribution of global power, and over the place that Latin American peoples will — or will not — be permitted to occupy within it.
Notes
[1] Michelle Ellner, “When Maria Corina Machado Wins the Nobel Peace Prize, ‘Peace’ Has Lost Its Meaning,” Brasil de Fato, 10 October 2025.
https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2025/10/10/when-maria-corina-machado-wins-the-nobel-peace-prize-peace-has-lost-its-meaning/
[2] Editorial Board, “This Could Be the Light at the End of Venezuela’s Tunnel,” The Washington Post, 17 November 2025.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/11/18/maria-corina-machado-freedom-manifesto-venezuela-maduro/
[3] Mary Anastasia O’Grady, “María Corina Machado’s Plan for Freedom,” The Wall Street Journal, 28 October 2025.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/maria-corina-machados-plan-for-freedom-49bf84ea
[4] Florantonia Singer, “María Corina Machado lanza un manifiesto en el que dibuja la Venezuela del futuro,” El País, 18 November 2025.
https://elpais.com/america/2025-11-18/maria-corina-machado-lanza-un-manifiesto-en-el-que-dibuja-la-venezuela-del-futuro.html
[5] Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Harvard University Press, 2010.
[6] Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, Harvard University Press, 2018.
[7] Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
[8] Jeffrey D. Sachs & Sybil Fares, “Venezuela’s Oil, US-Led Regime Change, and America’s Gangster Politics,” Just International, 4 November 2025.
https://just-international.org/articles/venezuelas-oil-us-led-regime-change-and-americas-gangster-politics/
[9] John Mearsheimer, “Confronting the Narco-Terrorist Threat from Venezuela,” Antiwar.com, 17 October 2025.
https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2025/10/17/john-mearsheimer-confronting-the-narco-terrorist-threat-from-venezuela/
[10] Ignacio Ramonet, “Nicolás Maduro: ‘Siempre hemos apostado por el diálogo y la paz’,” Le Monde Diplomatique, 18 November 2025.
https://mondiplo.com/nicolas-maduro-siempre-hemos-apostado-por-el
© 2025 Juan Manuel Cincunegui
Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Reproduction is permitted provided the author is credited. Commercial use is not allowed