Of all the Nobel Prize winners from Latin America, the choice of Maria Corina Machado, Venezuela’s opposition leader, is perhaps the most controversial. Machado, the “Venezuelan Iron Lady”, has elicited overwhelming support in the West, particularly the US, for her no-nonsense style and conservative, free-market ideology, and also for her tireless work in defending democratic rights and advocating a peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.

By all accounts, Machado is a highly controversial pick. One wonders if such choices, like Machado’s for the Nobel, are to celebrate past achievements or to affect the desired future course of events. The Nobel Committee has done it far too often by conferring the Peace Prize on the least deserving and controversial figures, like Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Lech Walesa and Liu Xiaobo, to name a few.

Norway takes pride in its diplomacy of peace, which it projects as a global exemplar. It has been engaged in conflict resolution in many parts of Latin America, including Colombia. Machado had asked Norway, a mediating country in the negotiations between the Maduro government and the opposition, to maximise compliance with the agreement guaranteeing free and fair elections.

Maria Machado, says Tulane University Professor David Smilde, author of The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela: Revolution, Crime and Policing, is “less a peace activist than a political operator willing to use some of the trade’s dark arts for the greater democratic good.”

The Nobel Foundation’s illusion of neutrality has worn increasingly thin over the years.........

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