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Lay Down Your Arms
Comment on the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 to Maria Corina Machado.
Understanding the Norwegian Nobel Committee: Why the committee again utterly misses Nobel’s target by giving the prize for 2025 to the Venezuelan right-wing oppositional politician, Maria Corina Machado.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has repeatedly stated that understanding and respecting Alfred Nobel’s will in their annual search for a worthy “Champion of Peace,” requires a continued adjustment of what ‘peace’ means in changing times. Following this recipe has allegedly been successful and has made the Peace Prize “the world’s most prestigious prize”. However, this success comes with a cost, a cost that brings the prize further and further away from Nobel’s intention. And closer to the powers that be.
Jan Öberg, long-time peace researcher and member of the board of Lay Down Your Arms, sums it up: “The Nobel Peace Prize was meant to uplift those dismantling the machinery of war…” And he adds, warningly: “—not those seeking to recalibrate it.” Alfred Nobel implored nations to lay down their weapons – weapons are not a way to peace. Start talking, negotiate, build friendships and find non-violent ways towards lasting peace.
The question of US influence on the committee’s decisions will have to be addressed more seriously than it has been up to now if the committee is to retain some degree of credibility. A laureate who is controversial in the eyes of the leadership in Washington has yet to appear, not only among the 21 US citizens who have received the prize, but in the more than one hundred Nobel Peace Prize laureates to date. Machado’s award for 2025 is no exception. She is, however, less disguised and opaque in her US-affiliation than any other candidate to date. This time the process has gone off the rails.
Having monitored the trajectory of Maria Corina Machado closely, as the committee is programmed to have done, it should come as no surprise to its five members that Machado would dedicate her prize to the American president, Donald Trump, and the fight to overthrow the government of Venezuela. The current US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, in a letter dated the 26th of August, 2024, nominated Machado in a language, almost to the letter, echoed in the committee chair’s award speech the 10th of October in Oslo. The USA’s grip on the Norwegian committee will really be hard to dismiss this time.
The Machado portrait needed more than a deceitful retoucher
In the morning of October 10, a shiveringly emotional Kristian Berg Harpviken, Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, calls Maria Corina Machado to tell her that she has been awarded the Alfred Nobel Peace Prize for 2025. The scene was movingly transmitted on air. Who could resist joining the director in this joyful moment? In the following meticulously orchestrated press conference, the committee chair presented the laureate this way:
The Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 goes to a brave and committed champion of peace – to a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness. As the leader of the democracy movement in Venezuela, Maria Corina Machado is one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times. Ms Machado has been a key unifying figure in a political opposition that was once deeply divided – an opposition that found common ground in the demand for free elections and representative government.
The committee’s chair further stated that Machado “meets all the three criteria stated in Alfred Nobel’s will for the selection of a peace prize laureate.” And he elaborated:
She has brought her country’s opposition together, she has never wavered in resisting the militarization of Venezuelan society, and she has been steadfast in her support for a peaceful transition to democracy.
Nothing in the above can be further from the truth.It is not only a blatant misreading of Nobel’s will, but a mendacious rendering of Machado’s political footprints: Maria Corina Machado stands for violent regime change, US-interventionism, use of dark, military force and support of Israel’s genocidal acts:
- With her intransigent personality, sheis a highly divisive figure in Venezuelan politics, also among opposition groups.
- As a dedicated right-wing Trump supporter, she recently welcomed the USA’s extrajudicial, fatal bombing of alleged Venezuelan “drug boats”.
- She advocates foreign military intervention in Venezuela. To the CBS News Network, she says that “the only way to stop the suppression [in Venezuela] is by force – US force”.
- She warned her country’s military leaders that a necessary regime change was at hand and that “either they sink with Maduro and his criminal system, or they contribute to saving Venezuela and save themselves”.
- She is “aligned with the darkest face of US militarism” says Yale professor Greg Grandin and contrasts Machado to the 1992 Guatemalan laureate Rigoberta Menchú who had her entire family wiped out by the forces Machado is affiliated with.
- Machado is a steadfast supporter of Netanyahu and Israel in the genocidal war against Palestinians. She tweeted: “The struggle of Venezuela is the struggle of Israel.”
- She has advocated the moving of Venezuelan embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, an act in violation of international law.
By endorsing Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize committee ominously gives an unacceptable green light for a dangerous future trajectory of a likely, and not too distant, violent attempt at regime change within and against Venezuela. This award can prove to be the most perilous Committee decision ever. Even with the widest or wildest possible understanding of what a “Champion for Peace” is, Machado more than fails to qualify, she is its antithesis.
It remains to be seen to what extent the dark colours in Machado’s true flag will be shown in the Nobel Peace Museum on December 10th. If you find the Machado’s quote “Celebrating Ballot over Bullets” flying outside the museum, you will know that Orwell’s dark world has won. For now.
See www.laydownyourarms.today for our alternative for a worthy Nobel Peace Prize “Champion of Peace”, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Paola Albanese.
Oslo/Gothenburg, October 12, 2025
John Y. Jones and Tomas Magnusson, co-chairs Lay Down Your Arms Board