In an open letter to Venezuelan regime-change fanatic Maria Corina Machado, published today in the Argentine daily Página12 Argentina’s 1980 Nobel Peace Prize winner, 94-year-old Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, challenged Machado to explain why she just betrayed her country by inviting U.S. President Donald Trump and the U.S. military to invade Venezuela and overthrow the government of Nicolás Maduro. In his skillfully composed letter, Pérez Esquivel asked why she didn’t dedicate her prize to the Venezuelan people instead of to Donald Trump. “You opt for the worst when you ask the U.S. to invade Venezuela.”
Pérez Esquivel speaks with the authority of one who has dedicated his life to the defense of human rights in Latin America and Argentina, and was arrested, jailed, and tortured in 1977 by the murderous Argentine military dictatorship because of that. He reported he was “surprised” that Machado had been nominated for this distinction, and wanted to share “a few reflections,” recalling what Argentines had suffered under the 1976-83 dictatorship, “resisting jail, torture, exile, with thousands of disappeared, kidnapped and disappeared children.” It was because of his devoted work in defense of human rights in Latin America, but particularly in Argentina, that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980.
To Machado, a creature of the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy and the global Project Democracy apparatus, Pérez Esquivel explained he didn’t accept the Nobel Prize for the prize itself, but “because of my commitment together with those peoples who share the struggles and hopes of building a new dawn…. I continue to be an apprentice of life and your stance and your political and social decisions worry me.” The Maduro government, he said, is a “democracy with its lights and shadows.” He praised the work of the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez but noted that the U.S. had continuously attacked him because it “can’t allow any country to leave its orbit of colonial dependence; it continues to assert that Latin America is its `backyard.’”
