Venezuelan government criticizes Nobel Institute for honoring a person who ‘calls for military action against Venezuela’

The president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, one of the most prominent leaders of Chavismo (Venezuela’s ruling structure), criticized the Norwegian Nobel Institute on Tuesday for awarding the opposition leader María Corina Machado the Nobel Peace Prize, arguing that the institution is honoring a person “who calls for military action against Venezuela and celebrates the killing of human beings in the Caribbean.” The leader of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) made these remarks in a speech on the floor of the Federal Legislative Palace. “Poor peace, poor Nobel,” Rodríguez said, making a particular effort to strip Machado of the political weight and moral prestige of the award.

Rodríguez railed against “the hypocrisy of peace organizations” and reproached the Nobel Institute for having previously recognized Winston Churchill with the Nobel Prize in Literature for his memoirs, or former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger with the Nobel Peace Prize.

During this debate, PSUV lawmakers — who comfortably dominate the seats of a parliament elected without the participation of the opposition — began discussions on Venezuela’s withdrawal from the Rome Statute, a move that would remove the country from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. The Nicolás Maduro regime faces numerous international accusations related to human rights violations.

Rodríguez’s statements constitute one of the first official reactions from the top Venezuelan leadership to the prize awarded to Machado, whose very name is taboo in local media and public discourse. Around the same time as Rodríguez’s remarks, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello had called for a mobilization of Chavista supporters in Caracas on Wednesday — the same day as the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony.

The march will once again commemorate the Battle of Santa Inés, a famous clash in the Federal War (a costly civil conflict born of racial hatred and social inequality) that took place in 1859. In that battle, the peasant forces of the caudillo Ezequiel Zamora — one of the national heroes of the Chavista imagination — defeated the conservative, landowning army of Pedro Estanislao Ramos.

“We don’t know anything about that auction,” Cabello said, referring to the Nobel ceremony. “It’s an auction to the highest bidder. All you have to do is look at who they’ve given that prize to before,” he argued. “We have the best prize, which is the peace of our people, the ability we have to decide our own destiny. We’ve earned it through our own effort.”

The state broadcaster Venezolana de Televisión included news of Machado’s Nobel Prize in its newscast, but only to highlight protests by a small group of far-left activists in Oslo, who criticized the award to the opposition leader and condemned a hypothetical military intervention in the country. “They put posters up all over the city: ‘No to the bloody Nobel.’ I don’t know what they’re talking about, because I don’t get involved in those issues. I have too much work,” Maduro said.

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