By Catherine Castro: Lebanese Marxist Analyst and Activist
It seems far removed now, the time when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to women during and after the Cold War for their struggles in favor of children’s education and the self-determination of peoples, such as Bett Williams [1976] and Rigoberta Menchu [1992].
In the era of “Great Again,” international institutions, under the guise of peace and law, crown female figures aligned with Western democracy, reproducing within themselves the very logics of domination. Peace thus becomes less an expression of the emancipation of peoples than a mechanism of normalization with the cultural hegemony of great men.
Since the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2025 to Maria Corina Machado, the former Venezuelan congresswoman and leading figure in the opposition to Nicolas Maduro's regime, the image of the Venezuelan woman—until then rendered invisible—has taken center stage in digital and media arenas.
With the abduction of Cilia Flores and her husband Nicolas Maduro, and the inauguration of Delcy Rodriguez as interim president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, this image multiplies and intensifies in the magnifying mirrors of geopolitical debates. These debates on international law and national sovereignty attempt to conceal the role of women in the geostrategy of the Latin American world.
Three female citizens, each in her own way, exemplify the strategies of political power in post-Maduro Venezuela. “A woman who keeps the flame of democracy alight amid a growing darkness.” It is through this Manichean rhetoric of the Dark Ages that the chairman of the Nobel Committee, Jorgen Watne Frydness, describes the laureate Maria Corina Machado, who had also received two distinct prizes awarded by the European community in 2024: The Sacharov Prize and the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize. Yet Ms. Machado neither worked to secure the rights of Indigenous peoples by recognizing their diversity nor financed their social structures through oil revenues. That was the work of Hugo Chavez.
Ms. Machado did not address the political causes of Venezuela and Cuba’s economic collapse, nor did she work to unify the Venezuelan opposition, as Mr. Frydness proclaims, but as a prominent figure in the upper class, she took part in the coup against Chavez in 2002 and signed the Carmona Decree that dissolved the National Assembly. Ms. Machado thus obtained the Nobel Peace Prize because she carries the banner of Western liberal democracies that consider “Israel” to be the only democracy in the Middle East.
The first woman to oppose the Chavista regime radically, disavowed by Donald Trump, she is forced to accept his calculated hospitality. For who could have prevented Trump from parachuting her into Nicolas Maduro’s military complex to finalize the hallucinatory scene of abduction? “A deus ex machina”, Netflix version.
Despite the Nobel Committee’s protestations, Senora Machado was properly exfiltrated from Venezuela. Her brief visit to the Vatican was nothing more than a staged moral laundering of a woman who commodified the Nobel Prize and sold peace to the Mephistopheles of aggressive nationalism, handing him the trophy of shame. Peace and war, the circulation of commodities on the global stage of carnivorous leadership.
This is not the case for the interim president, Comrade Delcy Rodriguez. The sister of the current president of the National Assembly received an uncompromising Marxist education; she considers that the Bolivarian Revolution came to “avenge” her father, Jorge Antonio Rodriguez, a fighter who died in detention when she was only seven years old. In this way, she draws on the thought of Hannah Arendt, for whom the political ideal remains tinged with affection. “We will never again be the colony of an empire,” she declared, refuting Trump, who called her “gracious” while claiming that she met with Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State.
Her participation in Chavista “state feminism” was gracious and decent. Rodriguez, first woman to serve as foreign minister and then as minister of finance and oil, who tried to circumvent Trump’s sanctions, represents a symbol of geopolitical resistance and a survival strategy, without succeeding in restoring her country’s sovereignty or developing an independent feminist discourse. The first woman installed as president by the Venezuelan armed forces, she has just announced a “partial reform” of the oil law at the same time that her exfiltrated compatriot has dedicated peace for Trump.
Between these two profiles, constructed and deconstructed according to shifting factual circumstances, emerges the viral false portrait of the “First Combatant,” Cilia Flores Maduro.
Hugo Chavez’s former lawyer appeared with a bandage on her forehead and a bruise under her left eye, head held high before the microphone, and on the desk were a bottle of water and an open notebook. While the signs of violence were inspired by her lawyer’s plea before the Federal Court of New York on January 5, 2026, the other elements are a distorted and superimposed image of his appearance before the United Nations Security Council.
Is this the image of international law held captive by physical violence, or conversely of a fractured state feminism whose speech is controlled? Did Cilia resist, first seeking to protect her husband? Was she beaten or the victim of a misstep? Isolated from Trump’s publicly barked threats, Cilia is aesthetically manipulated and displays on the world’s screens a superimposition of contrasting ideologies.
Venezuelan state feminism, embodied by Delcy Rodriguez and Cilia Flores, reveals a feminist geopolitics captured by the logics of power. Confronted with Maria Corina Machado’s commodification of peace, these figures expose the fractures of a broken social contract: Peace is no longer a balance between freedom and the general will [Jean-Jacques Rousseau] but an alienating and disavowed disciplinary order.
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