Prominent left-wing politicians, heads of state, and commentators reacted with vitriol, dismay, and apathy at the news this weekend that anti-socialist opposition leader María Corina Machado had won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
Machado, a former lawmaker violently ejected from her elected position in 2014, has spent much of her career challenging the devastating socialist repression in her country, first under late dictator Hugo Chávez and now under his successor Nicolás Maduro. Machado has consistently challenged socialism peacefully, demanding free and fair elections and leading peaceful protests. In her struggle, Machado has also endured challenges from power-hungry establishment “opposition” leaders in her country who have ties to the Socialist International and have offered no successful challenges to Maduro.
As a result of a barrage of death threats and gruesome attacks against her, Machado is currently hiding in an undisclosed location in Venezuela. The Norwegian Nobel Committee conceded on Friday, announcing the prize, that a “serious security situation” may prevent it from properly handing the award to Machado.
The Nobel Committee explained in its announcement of the award for Machado that she had won it “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
Machado subsequently dedicated her award to the Venezuelan people and to President Donald Trump, whom she credited with taking appropriate action to weaken the Maduro regime by targeting its cash flows from intercontinental drug trafficking.
As a result of her steadfast opposition to communism, and in part irked by her praise for Trump, left-wing figures throughout the world condemned the prize going to Machado throughout the weekend. Among the first to opine, and most viciously opposed, was the former head of the radical leftist Podemos party of Spain, Pablo Iglesias, who also served as a longtime host of Iranian state television.
“The truth is that to give the Nobel Peace Prize to Corina Machado [sic] who has spent years trying to stage a coup d’état in her country, they could have just given it to Trump directly or even to Adolf Hitler posthumously,” Iglesias wrote on the social media site Twitter. “Next year [Russian dictator Vladimir] Putin and [Ukrainian President] Volodymyr Zelensky can share it.”
In the pages of its official newspaper, Granma, the Communist Party of Cuba described the award as a “slap in the face.”
“A radical right-wing and violence-inciting opposition figure, María Corina Machado, whose greatest virtue is calling to disorder, instability, and chaos in Venezuela, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 2025,” Granma’s writers seethed.
“The politicization, partialization, and discrediting of the Norwegian Nobel Committee has reached unsuspected limits,” figurehead “president” of Cuba Miguel Díaz-Canel complained online.
“We firmly reject this political maneuver that intends to single out Venezuela,” the dictator added, calling the award “shameful.”
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a former member of the M19 Marxist guerrilla group and supporter of the Venezuelan regime, published an incoherent screed addressing Machado’s prize on Twitter on Saturday, apparently condemning her for having sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2018. Petro reproduced the letter, which was also addressed to Argentine then-President Mauricio Macri and explained, accurately and in detail, the nefarious relationship between the Venezuelan socialist regime and Islamist Iran, which poses a constant threat to neighboring Israel and was responsible for the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history.
In his rant, Petro compared Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler, a common epithet from the Colombian president.
“Why do you solicit help from a criminal against humanity, with an international order of capture, to bring democracy to Venezuela?” Petro wrote, referring to the controversial and poorly supported International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for Netanyahu. “What does it mean that you seek supported [sic] the only Latin American president who supported genocide and the genocidal actor?”
Elsewhere in the extensive letter, Petro complained that his visa allowing entry into the United States was recently canceled, a result of him yelling into a megaphone on the street in New York City that the U.S. military should stop obeying President Trump. Petro also added an aside discussing victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade choosing to jump overboard and drown in the Atlantic Ocean rather than arrive in America as slaves. However, he did not make a clear connection between the trans-Atlantic slave trade and his primary condemnation of Machado for sending a letter to Netanyahu seven years ago.
In the United States, radical Marxist activists decried the celebration of a peaceful anti-socialist figure who has, as polls have indicated for years, united the country behind her leadership against a regime notorious for extensive torture and killing of children.
Code Pink, a leftist movement that has been loudly supportive of Maduro, published a statement claiming the Nobel Committee “lost every ounce of credibility.” Notably, the prize has previously been given to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who has since been accused of genocide, and the World Food Programme (WFP), implicated in multiple sexual assault and rape scandals. Yet Machado’s recognition distinctly outraged Code Pink.
“Machado’s politics are steeped in violence. She has called for foreign intervention, even appealing directly to Benjamin Netanyahu,” Code Pink railed, echoing Petro, “the architect of Gaza’s annihilation, to help ‘liberate’ Venezuela with bombs under the banner of ‘freedom.’”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an alleged Muslim rights advocacy group that has been declared a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates and was named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas-funding operation, also weighed in negatively on the award, referring to Machado as a “supporter of anti-Muslim fascism.”
“We strongly disagree with the Nobel Prize committee’s decision to award this year’s peace prize to María Corina Machado, a supporter of Israel’s racist Likud Party,” CAIR said in a statement, “who earlier this year delivered remarks at a conference of European fascists, including Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, which openly called for a new Reconquista, referencing the ethnic cleansing of Spanish Muslims and Jews in the 1500s.”
The organization instead suggested the award should go to “one of the students, journalists, activists, medical professionals who have risked their careers and even their lives to oppose the crime of our time: the genocide in Gaza.”
Outside of the vocal condemnations, many observers of Latin American politics highlighted the silence from other left-wing leaders in the region, most notably Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who said she had “no comment” when directly asked about the award. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, once a close friend of Hugo Chávez’s who is rumored to have blocked Venezuela from entering the anti-American BRICS bloc out of personal distaste for Maduro, has also not commented at press time. Lula had previously mocked Machado after Maduro banned her from running for office.
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