A little more than two weeks ago, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to María Corina Machado—Venezuela’s leading opposition figure and mentor to the opposition candidate Edmundo González defeated in the 2024 election—as a stalwart champion of democratic principles against authoritarianism. Of course, that characterization flies in the face of her participation in a 2002 coup attempt that declared the Venezuelan constitution null and void, and she receives the Peace Prize despite her past calls for foreign military intervention against President Nicolás Maduro, whom (as Radio Free Pizza covered last year) the country’s own National Electoral Council (CNE) and international observers (including the U.S.’s National Lawyers Guild [NLG]) named the legitimate winner of the country’s 2024 presidential election, citing transparent electoral procedures with strong audit mechanisms, biometric verification, and paper backups.
From an ideological standpoint, Radio Free Pizza celebrated Maduro’s win as a victory against imperialism and a model for our own aspirational vision of “Libertarian Communism” in the U.S.—a system combining worker ownership, national resource control, and local democratic governance inspired by Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution. Meanwhile, supporters argued that Maduro’s economic recovery program, diversification efforts, and resistance to sanctions had restored growth (now at 17 straight quarters, and 9% in Q3 2025) and sharply reduced inflation. They saw his victory as proof of the resilience of Bolivarian socialism, Venezuela’s integration into the multipolar BRICS+ bloc, and the failure of U.S. efforts to topple the government.
Of course, Washington can’t have any of that. Accordingly, the second Trump Administration has followed in the steps of the first, continuing to posture against Venezuela since February, when it designated the Venezuelan prison gang and international crime syndicate Tren de Aragua as a terrorist organization. That gave the administration its pretext for increasing U.S. naval deployments in the Caribbean Sea in August—and in the same month announcing an increased bounty of up to $50 million for information leading to the arrest of President Maduro—before conducting its first “kinetic strike” against an alleged Venezuelan drug-trafficking vessel in September, extrajudicially killing eleven. Now, as of last Friday, the U.S. has conducted ten such strikes in the past two months, raising the known-death toll to forty-three.
But this American belligerence hasn’t proceeded unopposed. At the start of this month, a bipartisan Senate resolution to halt President Donald Trump’s military strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers narrowly failed, 51–48. The measure, led by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) and supported by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), sought to reassert Congress’s war powers, arguing that the strikes—conducted without congressional authorization—were unconstitutional. Democrats and Republicans alike accused the Trump Administration of bypassing established maritime interdiction protocols, with lawmakers from both parties saying it has provided no proof of the victims’ identities or ties to narcotics trafficking.
Meanwhile, though one can easily forgive observers for interpreting the Nobel Committee’s award to Machado as support for U.S. aggression—given her aforementioned calls for military intervention—this imperial adventurism naturally has its international critics. Earlier this month, Colombian President Gustavo Petro contradicted Trump Administration claims that U.S. military struck boats trafficking drugs for Tren de Aragua, saying that at least one vessel hit had been carrying Colombian civilians.
Then, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights last week published a press release describing how its experts condemned the U.S.’s covert actions and military threats against Venezuela, saying they had been carried out with no legal justification and calling them violations of Venezuela’s sovereignty, international law, and the UN Charter. Rejecting claims of self-defense against groups like Tren de Aragua, noting that these organizations are not attacking the U.S., the office urged Washington to end unlawful operations, respect international law, and pursue dialogue and peaceful solutions instead of a regime change that could destabilize the region.
Still, despite domestic and international condemnation, U.S. aggression has only increased. Just three days after the UNOHCHR press release, President Trump announced that U.S. forces are “coming in by land” in Venezuela, escalating his anti-narcotics campaign into what critics view as a potential act of war. At a White House press conference, President Trump called Latin American drug cartels “the ISIS of the Western Hemisphere,” saying he would not seek a declaration of war but would “kill people that are bringing drugs into our country.”
Though he won’t seek a declaration of war, the U.S. seems prepared to wage one, having now deployed nearly 10,000 troops, 10 warships, a nuclear submarine, and the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier to the Caribbean—its largest force presence there in decades. President Trump also claimed to have authorized covert CIA operations in Venezuela and—probably just out of spite for undermining his claims on the international stage—he added the aforementioned President Petro to the U.S. sanctions (OFAC) list after calling him a “drug leader.” But the U.S. intelligence community would most likely contradict President Trump, since it already contradicted his earlier claims that President Maduro directs Tren de Aragua. Meanwhile, the aforementioned Sen. Rand Paul challenged President Trump’s claims about the threat that the criminal syndicate poses to the American public, noting that fentanyl isn’t produced in Venezuela and that the attacked boats lacked the range to reach U.S. shores, and therefore calling the Administration’s rationale logistically implausible.
Given Washington’s deepening descent into unilateral militarism against a sovereign Venezuela, the Nobel Committee’s recognition of the coup-plotting Machado (whom Hugo Chávez once mocked as “a little bourgeoise”) hints at the imperial playbook in the South American theater: invade the country under the pretext of a “war on narco-terrorism” and install as its president a free-market conservative who welcomes the U.S. intervention and who will then dutifully privatize the country. (Coincidentally—or not—courts will hear final arguments on Tuesday about conflicts of interest in the auction of Citgo Petroleum’s parent company, PDV Holding, a state-owned enterprise belonging to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. So maybe a U.S. invasion is on hold until the court renders its ruling.) That, of course, follows the tried-and-true choreography of Western imperialist interventions throughout South America and the rest of the world.
As Radio Free Pizza has long argued, the struggle unfolding in Venezuela is not merely about one government or one ideology, but about the right of nations to chart their own course free from coercion. Whether the world drifts toward yet another manufactured war or moves instead toward genuine multipolar cooperation will depend on how firmly the peoples of the Americas—and especially those within the U.S.—insist on dialogue over domination, law over violence, and self-determination over empire. But if in the coming months or years the world sees a President Machado of Venezuela, it won’t be because she won an election.