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Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado

(www.nobelprize.org)
522 points pykello | 5 comments | 10 Oct 25 09:03 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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weli ◴[10 Oct 25 09:21 UTC] No.45536827[source]▶
Don't get me wrong. She has firmly opposed maduro and is a beacon of hope for many in Venezuela but she hasn't accomplished anything meaningful yet? She is just a career politician that just happens to be in the opposition of the venezuelan goverment when Maduro (a dictator) is in power. But she hasn't done anything extraordinary to merit the award.
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mananoreboton ◴[10 Oct 25 09:49 UTC] No.45537006[source]▶
Don't get me wrong, but perhaps what was missing was greater media coverage and genuine interest in Venezuela's situation. María Corina Machado orchestrated a HUGE covert months long operation to collect tally sheets from the overwhelming majority of voting machines during the 2024 presidential election. Her team trained poll watchers to demand vote receipts (as legally permitted) then capture and transmit that data through various channels, even from the most remote regions of the country. There are documented cases of people—poll workers and participants in the plan—being imprisoned or even killed for their involvement. Thanks to this operation, the website resultadospresidencialesvenezuela2024.com exists, where venezuelan can verify the actual vote count per candidate, backed by fingerprint records and the serial numbers of both the software and hardware used. These verified results confirm that Edmundo González was the true winner of the election. The data provides undeniable evidence that Nicolás Maduro installed himself as a dictator, with the full support of the national electoral authority, which, to this day, has refused to release the official election results (a procedure that has historically been routine).

You can also verify the results here https://macedoniadelnorte.com/ (a whole story behind this hostname). Again, only possible by the María Corina's huge effort

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thisislife2 ◴[10 Oct 25 11:29 UTC] No.45537654[source]▶
Sounds right from the playbook of the superpowers, when an oil rich country has a government that doesn't allow them to profit from their oil resources - (1) demonize the current leader and government, (2) Give international publicity and recognition to a politician ideologically friendly to them (3) Destabilise the unfriendly government by launching an internal / external war against them (4) Install the friendly puppet politician as the leader of the country (while shouting "democracy has won", if you are western superpower) (5) Profit!
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ch4s3 ◴[10 Oct 25 11:36 UTC] No.45537716[source]▶
This comment reads as deeply ignorant and callous toward the treatment of the Venezuelan people by their government. Fully 1/3 of Venezuelans have fled the country due to repression and economic decline due to Maduro’s mismanagement. As someone who reads Spanish I can tell you the the media in non US aligned Latin American countries is regularly reporting on the dictatorship in Venezuela.

Not everything is about oils or some conspiracy of western governments.

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somenameforme ◴[10 Oct 25 12:35 UTC] No.45538259[source]▶
You're creating a false dichotomy. It is true that Venezuela is very poorly governed, and it's also that the the US is doing everything they can to prevent Venezuela from monetizing their natural resources, oil in particular, in order to try to inflict economic suffering on the common people. This is the whole sadistic, and nonsensical, point of sanctions - inflict suffering on common people in hopes they'll blame their government instead of people inflicting suffering on them, overthrow their government, and then align themselves with the people inflicting suffering on them.

Without US sanctions Venezuela, and Venezuelans, would be in a dramatically better place today.

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lentil_soup ◴[10 Oct 25 13:07 UTC] No.45538572[source]▶
Don't think you know what you're talking about. The sanctions to the country came way after the economic, social and political chaos.
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1. somenameforme ◴[10 Oct 25 13:15 UTC] No.45538645[source]▶
Wiki conveniently has a nice graph demonstrating the real GDP/capita in Venezuela [1], which is reasonably reflective of the economic crisis. In 1980 it was around $16,000. By ~2013-2014 it had peaked a bit higher than $18,000 and had risen dramatically faster than the average for Latin America.

In 2014 there were mass protests against the government, in reality it was an attempt to overthrow the government, which was responded to with brutality. That brutality was met with sanctions. Today their GDP/capita is about $5000. That's obviously going to be explained in part by the decline in oil prices around the same time, but not to that degree, to say the least.

* - As an addendum here it's also unclear to me how exactly Wiki is calculating that figure and whether it accounts for, in any way, the substantial scale of emigration from Venezuela. If not, then the relative decline is even larger than it sounds.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_in_Venezuela#/media/Fil...

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2. lentil_soup ◴[10 Oct 25 13:36 UTC] No.45538850[source]▶
No, those sanctions were on very specific people, not companies or industries. Those came later in 2019 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_during_the_Venezuela...
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3. somenameforme ◴[10 Oct 25 14:00 UTC] No.45539171[source]▶
Not quite. A useful term related to sanctions is overcompliance. You can read the exact verbiage of some of the earliest sanctions here. [1] In a nutshell engaging in any form of trade (including transfer of expertise or whatever else) that directly or indirectly benefited a sanctioned person could trigger extremely harsh penalties.

Many government officials in Venezuela have direct involvement with various industries, including oil. So it suddenly becomes this extremely complex and dangerous mess when doing any trade whatsoever with Venezuela. This is why their economy completely collapsed following the sanctions.

[1] - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2015/03/11/2015-05...

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4. ErneX ◴[10 Oct 25 15:59 UTC] No.45540425{3}[source]▶
Our collapse predates the sanctions.

Also, Maduro is willing to trade our natural resources if it gets him more years in power:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/world/americas/maduro-ven...

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5. somenameforme ◴[10 Oct 25 17:48 UTC] No.45541751{4}[source]▶
Absolutely, which makes this whole thread all the more absurd, or at least typical. It seems increasingly likely we'll get a war in Venezuela, likely supported by this Nobel Peace Prize winner, with the goal of installing her in power. It seems Guaido is out of fashion? Anyhow, if "we" win, and she gets installed, you know the first thing she's going to do? Trade access to your natural resources for wealth and power. They're the only reason the US is there. And then in a decade you'll be ranting against her.

Look at the history of people the US sponsors in regime change operations around the world, and how things turn out. So long as they're loyal to the US, first and foremost, anything goes. Carlos Castillo Armas, Fulgencio Batista, Humberto Castelo Blanco, Augusto Pinochet, Efrain Rios Montt and many more though I'm limiting myself to the Americas. Of course I can fully understand the perspective that 'anything must be better than this shit show.' But it often turns out, in hindsight, that that's not exactly the case.

And in general this is a big part of the reason that I'm highly opposed to the US meddling in countries around the world. There's always such a heavy price to pay in American dollars and the blood of others. And.. for what? Yeah yeah, this time it's different...