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María Corina Machado in Caracas after voting in the presidential election last year. Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
A contentious peace prize winner
María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s de facto opposition leader, was awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for her attempts to push an authoritarian country toward democracy through peaceful means — at least for now.
When other opposition leaders fled into exile, she stayed to challenge a government that jails opponents, tortures critics and censors the press. She stayed in hiding for more than a year after President Nicolás Maduro declared victory in a vote that was widely seen as rigged. (Her daughter accepted the prize on her behalf yesterday; Mac…
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María Corina Machado in Caracas after voting in the presidential election last year. Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
A contentious peace prize winner
María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s de facto opposition leader, was awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for her attempts to push an authoritarian country toward democracy through peaceful means — at least for now.
When other opposition leaders fled into exile, she stayed to challenge a government that jails opponents, tortures critics and censors the press. She stayed in hiding for more than a year after President Nicolás Maduro declared victory in a vote that was widely seen as rigged. (Her daughter accepted the prize on her behalf yesterday; Machado herself said she was on her way to Oslo despite missing the ceremony.)
But Machado’s peace prize has been highly contentious. She dedicated it to President Trump, who has amassed U.S. warships in the Caribbean, killing at least 87 people in boats in strikes that critics say amount to war crimes. Officials in the Trump administration privately say their ultimate goal is to bring about regime change in Venezuela. Machado has expressed support for using force to oust Maduro.
She’s not the first Nobel laureate to attract controversy. But the reaction this year has been quite intense.
On Tuesday, protesters waved signs that read “No Peace Prize for Warmongers” outside the Nobel Institute. And yesterday, the Norwegian Peace Council — a group of 19 organizations promoting disarmament and conflict resolution — declined to hold its traditional torchlight procession to honor the laureate, saying Machado does not align with its “core values.”
The award has raised questions about the prize and its goals: If a politician actively calling for military intervention can win the Nobel Peace Prize, what is the prize for?
A long list of controversies
The Nobel Peace Prize’s actual relationship to peace has always been contentious, dating back to its origins in the will of Alfred Nobel, the 19th-century inventor of dynamite.
Some laureates have subsequently failed to live up the prize’s ideals: The Myanmar dissident Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the prize in 1991. Years later, after joining the government, she defended Myanmar against charges it had committed genocide against its Rohingya minority, prompting calls for her prize to be rescinded.
President Barack Obama was given the prize just months into his first term. He went on to preside over a vast expansion of the United States’ drone strike program.
On other occasions, the peace prize has gone to people actively or recently involved in military activities. Infamously, the prize went to Henry Kissinger in 1973, along with his North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, for negotiating a cease-fire in the Vietnam War, which soon fell apart. (The singer Tom Lehrer said the choice of Kissinger had rendered political satire obsolete.)
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Henry Kissinger shakes hands with Le Duc Tho in Paris in 1973. Credit...-/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The 2019 winner, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia, received the prize for introducing democratic changes and resolving a conflict with neighboring Eritrea. Shortly afterward, though, he ordered military operations and airstrikes against the Ethiopian region of Tigray, and skipped the news conference after his Nobel acceptance speech.
In those cases, the prize went to people involved in military conflicts, but who were seeking breakthroughs toward peace. In Machado’s case, she is encouraging military action as a means to achieve democracy.
Democracy and peace
The Nobel Peace Prize tends to be symbolic — less about the individuals, more about what they stand for. In that sense, Machado’s prize recognized thousands of Venezuelan activists and campaigners — people who risked their lives for democracy at a time when it seems to be under threat across the world, said Laura Gamboa, a Latin America specialist at the University of Utah.
And democracy and peace might be different things, but they’re often seen as linked, said Nina Graeger, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo*.*
Machado most likely still sees herself as pursuing the same goal — helping Venezuela transition from dictatorship to democracy — through different (yes, military) means. In her acceptance speech, Machado’s daughter said that the prize “reminds the world that democracy is essential to peace” and that “to have a democracy, we must be willing to fight for freedom.”
What the most controversial Nobel Peace Prizes really reveal is that the award is often on tricky terrain when it goes to a recipient who is actively engaged in politics, rather than imprisoned or in exile. Politicians who received the prize are almost always controversial in their own countries, Graeger said; by definition, they have opponents. They also engage in the pursuit of power and policymaking, which can often lead to compromises.
There’s a reason the peace prize was initially so uncontroversial when it went to Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991. At the time, she was under house arrest. The Nobel Committee tends to loves dissidents. But people with power — and the formerly powerless who may eventually obtain power — are more complicated.
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