Polls: 91% of Venezuelans Hold Unfavorable Views of Opposition Leader María Corina Machado

The Venezuelan people have spoken. Washington isn’t listening.

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HR News || Let us begin with a fact so stark it should end the conversation entirely: a Hinterlaces poll found that 91% of Venezuelans hold an unfavorable view of María Corina Machado, making her one of the most unpopular political figures in the country. Ninety-one percent. This is not a “divisive figure.” This is not a “controversial leader.” This is someone the Venezuelan people have comprehensively rejected.

And yet.

She receives the Nobel Peace Prize. She is feted in Washington. The editorial pages of major American newspapers lionize her as a freedom fighter. The machinery of empire grinds on, indifferent to what Venezuelans actually think about the woman being used as the human shield for American policy.

A DataViva survey showed that 89% of respondents considered Machado’s political image and actions negative, with only a small fraction expressing positive views. Another DataViva poll found that 86% of Venezuelans rejected the idea that Machado deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, and 84% believed she had not made real efforts toward peace in Venezuela. A survey by Datanálisis reported that 64.6% of Venezuelans rejected Machado’s role as an opposition leader, with just 18.6% expressing a positive view of her performance.

These are not marginal numbers. These are not the kind of figures you can massage or spin. This is a population screaming “no” in every poll, in every survey, through every available channel — and being ignored completely by the very people who claim to be liberating them.

The Nobel committee, that repository of Scandinavian respectability and humanitarian pretense, has outdone itself. Awarding Machado the Peace Prize while a massive majority of Venezuelans express disapproval is not merely tone-deaf. It is an act of supreme contempt for the very people whose freedom is supposedly at stake. Latin American social movements and leaders explicitly rejected the decision, calling it a distortion of the prize’s mission and a tool for interventionist consent manufacturing.

They’re not wrong.

Consider the grim arithmetic of American intervention. Only 3% of Venezuelans support U.S. military intervention. Three percent. Yet Machado has repeatedly called for precisely this kind of external military pressure — the kind that ordinary Venezuelans reject by margins that would make a Soviet election look competitive.

Here is where the imperial logic reveals itself in all its nakedness: It doesn’t matter what Venezuelans want. It never has.

U.S. sanctions have crushed Venezuela’s economy, freezing assets and cutting off oil markets. Washington recently seized a Venezuelan oil tanker in what Caracas called an act of piracy. These are not the actions of a country interested in Venezuelan self-determination. These are the actions of a country interested in Venezuelan oil, Venezuelan resources, Venezuelan compliance.

Machado is useful because she provides the democratic veneer for what is fundamentally an act of theft.

The historical record is instructive. Machado has been associated with previous coup attempts and has repeatedly called for military intervention. This is not speculation. This is biography. And yet the American press treats her past the way it treats American war crimes — as unfortunate complications best left unexamined.

The 2002 coup. The calls for foreign military force. The alignment with the most revanchist elements of Venezuelan exile politics. All of it scrubbed clean, repackaged, and sold back to the American public as “democracy promotion.”

What we are witnessing is textbook manufacturing of consent, and it operates by a simple mechanism: Amplify the voices that support your policy, silence or ignore the voices that don’t, and pretend the former represents popular will.

The polls don’t lie. The Venezuelan people have rendered their judgment. Let’s review the evidence one more time, because it bears repeating:

The Polling Evidence:

• Hinterlaces poll: 91% of Venezuelans hold an unfavorable view of Machado, making her one of the most unpopular political figures in the country.

• DataViva survey: 89% of respondents considered Machado’s political image and actions negative, with only a small fraction expressing positive views.

• DataViva poll on Nobel Prize: 86% of Venezuelans rejected the idea that Machado deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, and 84% believed she had not made real efforts toward peace in Venezuela.

• Datanálisis survey: 64.6% of Venezuelans rejected Machado’s role as an opposition leader, with just 18.6% expressing a positive view of her performance.

Across multiple surveys, massive majorities — consistently between 64% and 91% — reject Machado’s leadership, question her motives, and oppose her strategies.

But Washington has its story, and Washington will stick to it. Machado is the democrat. Maduro is the dictator. The sanctions are regrettable but necessary. The oil seizures are security measures. The economic collapse that has driven millions from their homes? That’s all Caracas’s fault.

Never mind that sanctions have crippled the economy and harmed ordinary Venezuelans far more than Venezuela’s internal policies alone. Never mind the frozen assets, the blocked markets, the systematic economic strangulation that preceded the worst of the humanitarian crisis.

The script is written. The roles are cast.

Here is the most galling part: American public opinion doesn’t even support this madness. Polling shows most Americans disapprove of military strikes in Venezuela. So we have a situation where neither Venezuelans nor Americans want intervention, but the policy apparatus grinds forward anyway, powered by think tanks, exile lobbies, and the bipartisan consensus that American hegemony in Latin America is a birthright.

History of Violence

For more than a century, the U.S. relationship with Venezuela has followed a grim imperial script: tolerate democracy only when it obeys Washington, sabotage it when it doesn’t. From early 20th-century backing of compliant strongmen to Cold War–era CIA meddling and modern “democracy promotion,” the pattern is constant — control the oil, discipline the politics. Declassified history shows U.S. intelligence agencies financing opposition groups, encouraging military defections, recognizing unelected “interim presidents,” imposing sanctions designed to strangle the economy, and then pointing at the wreckage as proof that the system “failed.” This is not concern for human rights; it’s regime change by attrition, a softer version of the old coup playbook updated for the age of NGOs, media warfare, and financial siege. Venezuela’s crime, inflation, and shortages didn’t fall from the sky — they were cultivated under economic warfare whose explicit aim was to make life unbearable until the government collapsed. Call it what it is: imperial management of the Global South, with a humanitarian halo slapped on top to make the theft look civilized.

This is not about democracy. If it were about democracy, Washington would listen when 91% of a population rejects its chosen instrument. If it were about human rights, the sanctions — which kill far more efficiently than bombs — would have been lifted years ago. If it were about self-determination, the first question would be: What do Venezuelans want?

But we know the answer to that question. They’ve told us, repeatedly, in poll after poll.

And that is precisely why no one in power is listening.