María Corina Machado Won’t Receive Peace Prize In Person, Nobel Director Says
OSLO, December 10 (Reuters) – Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado will not personally receive the Nobel Peace Prize at the award ceremony in Oslo on Wednesday, but her current whereabouts are unknown, the director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute said on Wednesday.
Machado, 58, was to receive his award at a ceremony at Oslo City Hall, attended by King Harald, Queen Sonja and Latin American leaders, including Argentinian President Javier Milei and Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa.
The ceremony starts at 13:00 (1200 GMT).
Machado would receive the award despite a decade-long travel ban by authorities in his home country and after more than a year in hiding.
“Unfortunately, he is not in Norway and will not appear on stage at Oslo City Hall at 13:00 when the ceremony begins,” Kristian Berg Harpviken, director of the institute and permanent secretary of the awarding body, told broadcaster NRK.
When asked where he was, Harpviken said: “I don’t know.”
dedicated to Trump
The ceremony will continue again. When a laureate is unable to attend, a close family member often steps in to receive the award and deliver the Nobel lecture in the laureate’s place.
In this case, it would be Machado’s daughter, Ana Corina Sosa Machado, Harpviken said.
When he won the award in October, Machado dedicated it in part to US President Donald Trump, who said he deserved the honor.
President Nicolas Maduro, who has been in power since 2013, has said that 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 attempts.
The Nobel Institute did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.
US Military Attacks
Machado aligns himself with hawks close to Trump who argue that 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.
Venezuelan armed forces plan to launch a guerrilla-style resistance or create chaos in the event of a U.S. air or ground attack, according to sources with knowledge of the effort and planning documents seen by Reuters.
Award for ‘International Verification’ of the Election Result
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 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.
Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow on Latin America at Chatham House, said the Nobel prize sent “a strong signal about the international validity of forgotten democratic outcomes.”
This elevates Machado to “a person on whom the international community and the world can pin their hopes,” he told Reuters.
“Democratic movements often need a face, a story.”
(Reporting by Gwladys Fouche and Terje Solsvik in Oslo; Editing by Alison Williams)
