Tomorrow is a historic day. Here in Oslo, in front of the Royal family, the Prime Minister and other members of the government, eminent parliamentarians, Ambassadors and other representatives of the elite, the very first Nobel Peace Prize EVER to encourage a war will be awarded!
This year's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, María Corina Machado, has called for military intervention in her own country, approved extrajudicial killings of civilians, and also wholeheartedly supported Israel's genocide in Gaza. She has also dedicated her entire political career to undemocratic and violent attempts at illegal regime change.
The award of the Peace Prize is based on her long struggle for democracy. The duration of this long struggle has actually been incredibly short. I have been an electoral observer in Venezuela since 2006, and in all presidential elections up until the election of 2024, she has called for a boycott, instigated violent demonstrations and lobbied to impose sanctions against opposition members who participated in democratic electoral processes.
In Venezuela, it is impossible to talk about free and fair democratic elections, not because of any undemocratic activities by the government, though they do sometimes occur, but due to the USA’s ongoing regime change project. The order of magnitude of USA intervention in Venezuela is no longer in question, but it is purposely ignored and trivialized by mainstream media.
Ever since the inauguration of Hugo Chavez as the country’s president in 1999, the mainstream media has promoted the narrative of an authoritarian, power-greedy and polarizing threat to so-called Liberal democracy. Using both crass tabloid manipulations and pseudo-academic analyses, based on the same false narrative.
This accelerated after 2017, when Donald Trump began his “maximum pressure” project for regime change led by John Bolton and Elliott Abrams. Trump’s targeted war on Venezuela’s economy, along with threats of military intervention, took the country’s economy to a new and destructive low point. The sanctions were some of the most severe we have ever seen in modern times.
UN rapporteurs have called this a “Medieval siege” in peacetime, which has caused millions to flee the country. Estimates of the impact of these sanctions point to an economic decline three times greater than that of the Great Depression of the 1930s (Washington Post). According to UN rapporteurs, the sanctions have caused over 40,000 deaths per year. This is a Gaza genocide every year for the 7 consecutive years the sanctions have been in place. In addition, around 7 million have emigrated and poverty skyrocketed. If there is any doubt about who the target of the sanctions is, we have Richard Nephew, a State Department advisor to both Presidents Obama and Biden who stated that "unilateral US economic restrictions are intentionally designed to exact suffering on the population on which they are imposed."
In parallel with these sanctions, the US has supported several coup attempts, military interventions and an assassination attempt on the president.
If any other country had to go through what Venezuela has gone through for three consecutive decades, it would have imposed a continuous state of emergency and abolished democratic institutions.
Nobel committee member Kristin Clemet must bear full responsibility for this scandalous award, an ideologically motivated gift package for her far-right Venezuelan friends. She is a close friend and collaborator with Thor Halvorssen Mendoza’s Oslo Freedom Forum, a right-wing elite “Human rights” forum that labels itself as the Davos of Human rights after the World Economic Forum. Mendoza runs the US financed Human Rights Foundation and is a close relative of Leopoldo Lopez, who has been involved in several coup attempts and was the instigator of the violent "Guarimbas" in 2014-2017. This in itself should make her illegible to sit in a so prestigious committee.
Together with the other committee members, she has contributed to bringing the Nobel Peace Prize into disrepute and reducing its credibility as a tool for world peace.
In a curious television interview with Nobel Institutes secretary, Kristian Berg Harpviken, Sunday, he was asked if the extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean were not a cause for concern for the Nobel committees award to Maria Corina Machado. He answered that the committee could not be held responsible for events that occurred after the announcement of the peace prize. The announcement was made on the 10th of October, the attacks began on the 2nd of September.
The Nobel Committee made their decision knowing full well that the award would function as a justification for illegal military intervention. This is a scandal of such enormous dimension that the entire Nobel committee must resign and, as Mauro Herrera will argue later, the Swedish Foundations office and The Nobel Foundation must remove Norway’s right to award the World’s most prestigious peace prize