Nobel Laureate Machado Arrives In Oslo, Hours After Award Ceremony

OSLO, Dec 10 (Reuters) – Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado arrived in Oslo at midnight on Thursday after failing to reach the Norwegian capital in time to receive her award at a ceremony held hours earlier.

The 58-year-old engineer had defied a decade-long travel ban imposed by authorities in his home country and secretly left Venezuela for Oslo after hiding for more than a year.

“I can confirm that Maria Corina Machado has arrived in Oslo,” Joergen Watne Frydnes told people gathered in the lobby of the Grand Hotel, where Nobel laureates traditionally stay.

“He’s coming here, but he’s going straight to meet his family… See you tomorrow.”

Her daughter, Ana Corina Sosa Machado, accepted the Nobel Prize on her behalf and said in her mother’s speech that democracies must be ready for the struggle for freedom in order to survive.

In his speech, Machado said that the award has a deep meaning not only for his country but also for the world.

“This reminds the world that democracy is necessary for peace,” he said through his daughter, whose voice cracked when talking about her mother. “And above all, what we Venezuelans can offer the world is the lesson learned in this long and difficult journey: To have democracy, we must be willing to fight for freedom.”

Machado left Venezuela by boat on Tuesday for the Caribbean island of Curacao, from where he took a private plane to Norway, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The source who received information from Machado’s camp said that his escape from the Venezuelan coast was carried out by security personnel. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Machado’s trip to Curacao, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

A large portrait of a smiling Machado was hung in Oslo City Hall to represent him. The audience cheered and applauded when Joergen Watne Frydnes, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said in his speech that Machado would come to Oslo.

Evoking previous laureates Nelson Mandela and Lech Walesa, he said democracy fighters were expected to “achieve their goals with a moral purity that their opponents never displayed.”

“This is unrealistic. It’s not fair,” he said.

“No democracy works under ideal conditions. Activist leaders must confront and resolve dilemmas that we, the audience, are free to ignore. People living under dictatorship often have to choose between the difficult and the impossible.”

“Freedom is a choice that must be renewed every day, measured by our willingness and courage to defend it. That is why the Venezuelan case goes beyond our borders,” he said in his prepared speech.

“A people who choose freedom contributes not only to itself but also to humanity.”

Machado was barred from running in the 2024 presidential election despite winning the opposition primary by a landslide. He went into hiding in August 2024 after authorities expanded arrests of opposition figures following the controversial vote.

The electoral authority and the supreme court declared President Nicolas Maduro the winner, but international observers and the opposition say the candidate won easily and the opposition has released poll-level tallies as evidence of its victory.

In his speech, Machado said that Venezuelans did not realize in time that their country was drifting, in his words, towards dictatorship.

Referring to the late president Hugo Chavez, who was elected in 1999 and remained in power until his death in 2013, Machado said: “When we realized how fragile our institutions had become, a man who had once led a military coup to overthrow democracy was elected president. Many thought charisma could replace the rule of law.”

“Since 1999, the regime has eliminated our democracy.”

President Nicolas Maduro, who has been in power since 2013, said US President Donald Trump is trying to oust him to gain access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves and that Venezuelan citizens and armed forces will resist such an attempt.

When Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize in October, he dedicated it in part to Trump, who said he deserved the honor.

He has aligned himself with hawks close to Trump who claim Maduro has ties to criminal gangs that pose a direct threat to US national security, despite doubts expressed by the US intelligence community.

The Trump administration has ordered more than 20 military strikes in recent months against ships allegedly smuggling drugs in the Caribbean and off Latin America’s Pacific coast.

Human rights groups, some Democrats and many Latin American countries condemned the attacks as unlawful extrajudicial killings of civilians.

(Reporting by Gwladys Fouche, Terje Solsvik, Miguel Pereira, Tom Little and Leonhard Foeger in Oslo, Matt Spetalnick in Washington, DC, Ilze Filks and Niklas Pollard in Stockholm; Editing by Alison Williams, Alex Richardson and Michael Perry)