Nobel Prize winner Machado in Oslo – and what happens next?

Nobel Peace Prize

Nobel Prize winner Machado in Oslo – and what happens next?

She didn’t make it to the Nobel Prize ceremony in time, but the Venezuelan María Corina Machado is still receiving a frenzied reception in Norway. The big question is what happens after Oslo.

The big news is that she is there at all: After more than a year in the Venezuelan underground, Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado has made it to Oslo in an adventurous way. The opposition leader appeared on a balcony of the Grand Hotel in the center of the Norwegian capital at 2:24 a.m. on Thursday night.

Afterwards, the leading opponent of the authoritarian head of state Nicolás Maduro greeted her supporters on the street in front of the hotel. They had previously sung the Venezuelan national anthem and chanted “libertad, libertad” (freedom, freedom).

With her arrival in Norway almost half a day after the actual Nobel Prize ceremony, Machado’s sensational trip, which took place in absolute secrecy, reaches its climax for the time being.

According to a media report, she was disguised and wearing a wig, passing numerous military posts and accompanying her, first from a suburb of the capital Caracas to the Venezuelan coast, then taken by fishing boat to the Caribbean island of Curaçao and finally flown to Norway via the USA on a private plane.

The 58-year-old reported an emotional reunion with her three adult children the following morning. For many weeks she longed for it and wondered which of the three she would hug first, Machado said at a press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. “I then hugged all three of them at the same time, and it was one of the most extraordinary, moving moments of my life,” she said.

One of the three children, daughter Ana Corina Sosa Machado, accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on her behalf at a ceremony in Oslo City Hall on Wednesday. At the event, she also read out the Nobel speech that Machado had written for the occasion. “This prize has a profound meaning: it reminds the world that democracy is essential for peace,” she stressed in the speech.

Machado repeated this message personally the following day. “Our experience in Venezuela provides a testimony to the world that peace requires democracy,” she said. “Democracy is the system that enables peace in a society. But without freedom there can be no democracy.”

Machado is the main representative of the Venezuelan opposition. Last year she was the driving force behind the election campaign of the opposition candidate Edmundo González, who won the presidential election according to government opponents and numerous third countries. Despite the allegations of fraud, the authoritarian President Maduro was declared the winner. González then went into exile in Spain. Numerous other opposition members have long since fled abroad.