Across Latin America, democracy is coming under severe pressure. Authoritarian leaders across the continent have been entrenching political power through constitutional manipulation, militarised policing and the persecution of dissent.
In Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Argentina, regimes are increasingly eroding democracy and mounting a backlash against human rights.
It is in this bleak regional landscape that the Nobel Committee’s decision to award the 2025 peace prize to María Corina Machado has landed. The award is a recognition of one woman’s defiance. But it is also an opportunity to ask what kind of democracy and what kind of peace the world should aspire to.
Machado has long been the face of Venezuela’s democratic opposition. Disqualified from public office, vilified by Nicolás Maduro’s regime and repeatedly threatened, she embodies the persistence of civic dissent.
The Nobel prize committee’s citation reads: “She is receiving the Nobel Peace Prize 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.”
Yet that transition is a long way from being achieved and remains deeply uncertain. Venezuela has fallen victim to increasing political polarisation and is now suffering one of the worst displacement crises in the hemisphere, with 8 million people having left the country since 2014. And the threat of US interference is ever present.
The prize thus risks celebrating an aspiration more than an outcome. It represents a fragile hope in a region where democratic renewal is both urgent and unfinished.
A feminist reading of courage and contradiction
The award makes Machado the first Venezuelan to receive the Nobel peace prize, underscoring the international significance of her career and support for the Venezuelan democratic cause. There is no doubt that her courage is extraordinary.
Machado has refused exile, rejected violence and unified a fragmented opposition under conditions that would crush most political careers. She was forced to go into hiding last year shortly after alleging fraud in Nicolás Maduro’s reelection on July 28 2024.
For decades, women in Latin America have been at the forefront of resistance movements. From the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina to the Ni Una Menos protests in Buenos Aires, Santiago, Bogotá and Mexico City, women’s groups have focused on advancing human rights and social justice. Machado’s recognition inserts Venezuelan women’s political agency into that prominent tradition.
In a region where politics remains saturated by machismo and military archetypes, this is not trivial. The image of a woman – assertive, unapologetic, unbowed – being recognised as a symbol of peace and democratic resistance matters deeply.
Yet the discussion cannot stop there. Machado comes from a powerful business family. She was educated in exclusive schools in Venezuela and the US and shaped by early work in her family’s steel company – all of which may have informed and defined her political outlook.
Her position as an elite woman in a country whose crisis has hit the poor and working-class hardest highlights the need to broaden the conversation about what a just and inclusive democracy looks like.
Her economic agenda – market-oriented and pro-privatisation – raises questions about whether democratic renewal can balance economic reforms, social protection and grassroots priorities. It asks how best to address inequalities that underpin Venezuela’s crisis.
In recognising Machado, the Nobel committee has invited reflection not only on the courage of individual leaders but also on how democratic movements can more fully integrate issues of peace and social justice for all alongside the fight against authoritarianism.
Democracy, peace, and the displaced
The Nobel committee described Machado’s resistance as peaceful. In Venezuela the concept of peace is multifaceted. It encompasses not only the absence of violence but also the profound challenges of hunger, displacement and uncertainty that millions continue to face.
The mass displacement since 2014 has disproportionately affected women and girls. They often flee for gender-specific reasons such as the collapse of maternal healthcare and increased rates of gender-based violence. Many have been exposed to trafficking and sexual violence and have faced bureaucratic indifference.
They are the collateral damage of Venezuela’s authoritarian collapse. But they are also symptomatic of an international order that fails to protect women.
This situation underscores the necessity of broadening our understanding of peace to include the protection and rights of women – in this case, the many displaced Venezuelan women and girls.
It must demand a transition that not only restores electoral democracy but guarantees dignity for those who lost everything to repression and political, economic and humanitarian decay.
A mirror for the region
Machado’s Nobel prize is especially timely given that it has been awarded against a backdrop of democratic backsliding and even erosion across Latin America. Her experience highlights the way that the more democracy is undermined by a regime in power, the more difficult it becomes for an opposition to unseat that regime in elections – or assume office if it does win power.
Latin American democracies are losing institutional capacity to restrain the executive – while on the streets, popular protest is often forcibly repressed. Many opposition politicians and activists have no option but to flee or hide.
This has been Machado’s experience. But this Nobel prize sends a signal that global institutions are watching and highlights the deep concern for the future of democracy and the fragility of peace.
Pia Riggirozzi have received funding from ESRC for the project Redressing Gendered Health Inequalities of Displaced Women and Girls in Contexts of Protracted Crisis in Central and South America (ReGHID)
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
