Venezuelan Nobel peace prize winner will not attend ceremony, say organisers | María Corina Machado
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado will not attend the Nobel peace prize ceremony and the award will be accepted by her daughter, organizers said.
Machado has been seen in public only once since going into hiding amid a tense showdown with President Nicolás Maduro in August last year. Venezuela’s chief prosecutor said Machado, 58, would be considered a “fugitive” if he left the country to accept the award.
In the hours before Wednesday’s ceremony, it was not known whether Machado would be in Norway for the event, which starts at 1pm (1200 GMT), but Nobel Institute spokesman Erik Aasheim eventually confirmed he would not be there.
Nobel Institute director Kristian Berg Harpviken said in a statement to Norway’s NRK radio, “Her daughter Ana Corina Machado will receive the award on behalf of her mother.” “The daughter will give the speech that María Corina herself wrote.”
Harpviken said he “simply” did not know where Machado was.
His mother, his three daughters, and some Latin American heads of state, including Argentinian President Javier Milei, are in Oslo for the awards ceremony to be held at Oslo City Hall.
Although organizers said Machado had previously indicated he would attend, suspicions were raised when a traditional press conference with the award winner on Tuesday was first postponed and then cancelled.
Machado accused Maduro of stealing Venezuela’s July 2024 election, from which he was banned. His claim is supported by much of the international community.
The Oslo ceremony coincides with a massive US military buildup in the Caribbean in recent weeks and deadly attacks on what Washington says are drug-smuggling boats.
Maduro said that the aim of the US operations, which Machado said was right, was to overthrow the government and seize Venezuela’s oil reserves.
Since going into hiding, Machado has made his only public appearance on January 9, in Caracas, where he protested Maduro’s third-term inauguration.
The opposition claimed that its candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, won the election. He currently lives in exile and was in Oslo on Wednesday.
Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on October 10 for his efforts to bring democracy to Venezuela by challenging Maduro’s iron fist rule since 2013.
Venezuela’s attorney general, Tarek William Saab, said last month that the opposition leader would be considered a “fugitive” if he traveled to Norway to accept the award.
“He is considered a fugitive because he is outside Venezuela and has undergone multiple criminal investigations,” Saab said, adding that he was accused of “acts of conspiracy, incitement of hatred, terrorism.”
“There have been many times in the history of the peace prize when the laureate has been prevented from attending the ceremony, and in these cases it has always happened that close family members of the laureate receive the award and deliver the lecture in the laureate’s stead,” Harpviken said this week.
Doubts had grown about how Machado would return to Venezuela.
Benedicte Bull, a professor specializing in Latin America at the University of Oslo, said: “Even if the authorities show him more restraint than they do to many others, he still risks being arrested if he returns, because detaining him would have a very strong symbolic value.”
On the other hand, Bull added, “He is the undisputed leader of the opposition, but if he remains in exile for a long time, I think this situation will change and he will gradually lose his political influence.”
While Machado has been hailed by many for his efforts to bring democracy to Venezuela, he has also been criticized by others for aligning himself with US president Donald Trump, to whom he dedicated his Nobel Prize.
Nobel Prize winners in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and economics will receive their awards at a separate ceremony in Stockholm on Wednesday.
