María Corina Machado is the Venezuelan opposition leader awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and John Kiriakou’s assessment of her political weight is deflationary.
“I don’t think she’s any more than Juan Guaidó was. The right-wing opposition is divided. It’s always been divided. María Machado may have won the Nobel Peace Prize, but it’s my understanding that she’s no more popular than any other right-wing political figure.”[1][2] The comparison is one he reached for from the beginning, and he offers it with an explicit caveat that Venezuela is not his area: on the morning the prize was announced his first reaction was that he had understood her to be “the female Juan Guaidó” — “just another Juan Guaidó.”[3][4]
The specific deficiency he names is coercive rather than electoral: “she doesn’t command armies, she doesn’t command troops. I just don’t see her turning into anything there.”[5]
The prize as an instrument
Asked whether the Nobel was part of the Western effort to weaken the Maduro government, Kiriakou’s answer was that it was, and that the manoeuvre was “really kind of transparent and cheap.” He set it in the context of everything else already being applied — U.S. warships off the coast, drones destroying Venezuelan-flagged boats that may or may not have been connected to drug cartels, more than two dozen Venezuelans killed, and the sanctions on top of that — and called the award one more element of a massive propaganda campaign. “It’s kind of like Hugo Chávez 2.0. The US is determined to have a puppet government in Venezuela as the largest oil producer in the Western Hemisphere … I think it’s really just that simple.”[6][7] He noted at the time that she was in hiding, leaving it unclear whether she would appear in Oslo to accept it.[4]
The day after Maduro
Pressed on who would actually govern once Maduro was gone, Kiriakou ruled out both the opposition figures on offer: “It’s not going to be Juan Guaidó, whom nobody had ever heard of. It’s not going to be this woman that just won the Nobel Peace Prize, of all things.”[8]
His reasoning runs through the standard requirements of a coup, which he says are taught at West Point: take the presidential palace and arrest, kill or exile the leader; take the radio and television stations; take the major intersections in the capital; and have the support of the military. On the last of these the arithmetic is against Washington — the Venezuelan military supports Maduro, not the opposition — which leaves ground troops and a hot war against a country that poses no threat. “I just don’t see any upside to a policy of trying to overthrow the Venezuelan government.”[9][10]
From which follows his forecast for a post-Maduro Venezuela: “in the event that Maduro leaves, I would look for the next leader to be a senior military officer” — a military transitional government after a period of chaos, “maybe not permanently.”[11][12]