Framing the new Nobel Peace Prize laureate

It is 9 January 2025. María Corina Machado, the main figure of the Venezuelan opposition, leads a demonstration against the reinauguration of President Nicolás Maduro. Her presence is far from insignificant: it is the first time in months that she has left her safe house, for security reasons. Her decision to stay in Venezuela despite the personal risks earned her the Nobel Peace Prize this autumn, and worldwide recognition.

Here, her symbolic power lies in the details. Dressed casually in jeans, she strikes a contrast with Maduro’s rigid, vertical power structure, blending in with the demonstrators surrounding her. She appears as one of them, while several women at the front of the photo raise their phones for a selfie. All smiles, she wears a T-shirt emblazoned with ConVzla – short for Comando Con Venezuela (‘with Venezuela’) – a slogan of national solidarity, and the name of an informal movement founded in 2023 to support her candidacy. Her ease and smile serve as a quiet declaration that she refuses to be intimidated by the regime. With the white flowers, she signals peace and transparency; with the T-shirt, she embodies civic resistance and a nation’s struggle to reclaim its sovereignty. Her necklaces, some adorned with crosses and colourful beads, fuse spirituality with political struggle, a familiar motif in Latin American movements where faith is seen as a moral source of courage and legitimacy.

But naturally, every populist begins by claiming to be ‘of the people’, which is precisely what this image conveys. Yet behind a discreetly orchestrated staging lies the complexity of the world of ideas. A defender of free trade, the privatization of national resources and the dismantling of the social achievements of socialism, she is seen in the political landscape as a figure of the Venezuelan far right.

History has shown that opposition figures have often been too easily endorsed on the sole grounds that they stood against authoritarian regimes. Machado firmly supports Donald Trump (just as she openly backs Javier Milei and Jair Bolsonaro in Argentina and Brazil). In recent weeks in Venezuela, under the pretext of fighting drug trafficking, Donald Trump has carried out targeted – and deadly – operations: warships dispatched, vessels sunk, threats of ground strikes. He declared that ‘drug cartels are the Islamic State of the Western Hemisphere’, and this, in his view, imparts full legitimacy to his methods of action, deploying the old rulebook of US interference. Although María Corina Machado holds the Nobel Peace Prize – a distinction Trump himself covets – her political allies are hardly known as champions of human rights or as voices of reconciliation.