A woman won a Nobel Peace Prize. A leftist feminist refused to cheer

María Corina Machado risked everything to fight tyranny. Why couldn’t Mexico’s Sheinbaum offer even a single word of support?

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A Nobel Peace Prize is more than a medal. It is the world’s faint nod to moral courage, given rarely and often late. This year, the committee honoured María Corina Machado who has spent a generation defying one of the hemisphere’s most repressive regimes. It was a rare moment of justice for a woman who has spent years risking everything to keep alive the hope of a free Venezuela.

When reporters in Mexico City asked President Claudia Sheinbaum, the first woman ever to govern Mexico, for her reaction, she replied with two words: “No comment.” Then she added that Mexico respects the sovereignty and self-determination of peoples.

The remark was not neutral. It was a retreat behind a diplomatic parapet to avoid acknowledging a fellow Latin American woman whose moral standing exposes the failures of the region’s left.

Machado’s story is one of endurance. She co-founded Súmate, a citizen movement for transparent elections, at a time when Hugo Chávez—Venezuela’s late socialist strongman—was turning populism into a state religion. For that act of civic participation, the Chávez regime charged her with treason.

When she won the opposition’s presidential primary with more than 90 per cent of the vote, Nicolás Maduro—Chávez’s successor and widely regarded as the architect of Venezuela’s modern dictatorship—banned her from public office for 15 years. She carried on, walking the dusty roads of a broken republic, addressing crowds that have learned to whisper freedom as an act of resistance.

Machado’s Nobel is not a reward for rhetoric but for perseverance under tyrannical persecution. The prize recognizes the courage of millions of Venezuelans who have endured shortages, censorship, exile and torture in the silent terror of a police state.

It is a rebuke to the doctrine that power must be judged by its intentions rather than its outcomes. Socialism in Venezuela promised equality and delivered hunger. Machado’s stubborn defence of liberty is a reminder that the individual remains the last line of resistance against collectivist decay.

Claudia Sheinbaum knows what the prize means. She rose through Mexico’s leftist movement under Andrés Manuel López Obrador—widely known as AMLO—whose government has aligned closely with authoritarian regimes in Havana, Managua and Caracas in ways many critics describe as ideological kinship. Her own presidency was greeted as a triumph of modern feminism. One might have expected her to salute another woman’s ascent to global recognition. She did not.

Silence can be as meaningful as speech. Sheinbaum’s refusal to offer even a token congratulation revealed a “feminism” bound by rigid doctrine: generous to its allies, mute toward its heretics. A confident leader might have found words of grace: something simple, something true. Grace costs nothing and enlarges the one who offers it.

Mexico appears to invoke sovereignty selectively, shielding regimes it views as friendly and abandoning the principle when moral clarity becomes inconvenient. Mexico’s Estrada Doctrine—a long-standing foreign policy of non-intervention, originally intended to resist U.S. imperialism—has decayed into a pretext for moral evasion. Sovereignty is not a virtue when it serves as cover for tyranny. Honouring Machado’s courage would not have violated Mexico’s independence; it would have affirmed the hemisphere’s shared respect for liberty.

Politics in Latin America suffers from a chronic poverty of magnanimity. Too many leaders applaud rebellion only when it flatters their side, mistaking party loyalty for moral seriousness. The result is a small theatre of indignation where principle is rationed by ideology. Even a modest gesture of decency becomes a political risk. That is how moral cowardice is elevated to statecraft.

Sheinbaum’s “no comment” was not a scandal. It was a failure of leadership, a missed chance to rise above faction. The Nobel committee recognized in Machado a virtue that should transcend ideology: the quiet, unyielding insistence that truth is not the property of the powerful. By turning away from that moment, Sheinbaum diminished her own office and Mexico’s moral standing in the region.

Would she have stayed silent if the laureate had been another Rigoberta Menchú, the Guatemalan activist once canonized by the left? One doubts it. Menchú’s socialism made her safe to praise. Machado’s liberalism makes her dangerous to admire. Yet courage is not a partisan quality, and tyranny does not change its nature because it waves a red flag instead of a blue one.

A stateswoman recognizes virtue wherever it appears. Sheinbaum chose not to. The better angels of our politics are seldom found in slogans or doctrines. They reside in the rare moments when one human being, faced with another’s courage, can say with sincerity: Well done.

Until that habit returns to Latin America’s public life, its would-be democracies remain brittle and its self-declared feminists conditional.

Marco Navarro-Genie is vice-president of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and co-author, with Barry Cooper, of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023).