Nicolás Maduro: ‘If you want peace, prepare to win it’

Nicolás Maduro appeared at a public event on Sunday to mark October 12, a date that Chavismo — the socialist movement founded by former president Hugo Chávez and continued by Maduro — has renamed “Indigenous Resistance Day.” “If you want peace, prepare to win it,” declared the president, wearing a feathered headdress and carrying an Indigenous weapon on his shoulder. It was his first public statement since the announcement that Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Maduro used the occasion to reiterate that the union of the military, police, and people would allow them, in his view, to defeat the threats of imperialism, referring to the U.S. military deployment off Venezuela’s coasts. “We don’t want to be slaves of the gringos,” he said. Speaking from Caracas, where he inaugurated two new statues honoring Indigenous heroes, he also called for the creation of Indigenous militias, even international ones involving other ethnic groups in the region that, he claimed, had expressed solidarity amid rising tensions with Washington.

As is typical of Chavista rhetoric, Maduro did not mention Machado by name, instead referring to her through insults and avoiding any acknowledgment of the Nobel Committee’s decision. “Ninety percent of the population rejects the demonic witch of La Sayona [a horror character from a Latin American folk legend],” he said, citing a poll by Hinterlaces, a firm aligned with the government. “We want peace, and we will have peace — but peace with freedom, with sovereignty, independence, and equality. Not the peace of Gaza’s ruins or the peace of death,” he added.

The massive international impact of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Machado — who has been in hiding for a year — has been met with caution inside Venezuela. There have been no public celebrations, as the government increased repression after the July 28, 2024 elections, in which the opposition exposed alleged electoral fraud using voting records. Still, some Venezuelans say they hope the recognition will help push forward a democratic transition.

Until last year, Machado was the most popular political leader Venezuela had seen in decades, with approval ratings above 80%, according to the country’s leading pollsters. She successfully transferred that support to her successor, Edmundo González, in the presidential race from which Chavismo barred her, in violation of the Barbados Agreements and the Constitution. Her popularity mirrored the people’s strong desire for political change. She swept the opposition primaries, rising from single-digit support, and led a civic movement to obtain records of the paper vote tallies that she claims prove the opposition’s victory.

Despite the renewed stagnation of Venezuela’s political crisis and the uncertainty following Maduro’s new term — which he assumed without publishing the voting records — Machado remains the country’s most influential opposition figure, even with diminished visibility. The Nobel Prize, awarded “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,” has given her a new boost of legitimacy and momentum.

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