“Is there anything known about that? That is the question that is attracting attention among Venezuelans and journalists who have begun to arrive in Oslo before the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony is held this Wednesday for Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado. The 58-year-old leader, a symbol of dissidence and opposition to Chavismo, announced a couple of weeks ago that, like the Norwegian Nobel Institute, which has continued with the preparations under the assumption that Machado will be in the Nordic country to participate in all the activities planned for this week, including a press conference scheduled for this Tuesday.
Just a few hours before the official events begin, the arrival of the opposition leader is, however, a mystery. If it occurs, it would be Machado’s first public appearance since August of last year, when he decided to continue his political work from underground after the post-electoral crisis that followed the presidential elections of July 28, 2024. “I think so. [la vamos a ver]”But I can’t assure you yet,” Corina Parisca, the mother of the Venezuelan Nobel laureate, told journalist Andreina Flores, upon arriving at the airport in the Norwegian capital. Parisca, who has stated that she has not seen her daughter for more than a year, added that it would be a “miracle” if she manages to leave Venezuela.
Ana Corina Sosa, daughter of the former Venezuelan representative, is also already in Oslo, as are other guests of honor of Machado, such as the Panamanian president, José Raúl Mulino. “I reiterated Panama’s support for the freedom of the Venezuelan people,” the Central American president wrote after meeting with relatives of the winner, part of a permanent trickle of Venezuelans in the diaspora who have traveled thousands of kilometers to meet at a moment they consider historic. “We Panamanians know what it is to face hard times, we lived through it in 1989,” he added.
Mulino refers to the United States invasion of Panamanian territory that ended with the surrender of dictator Manuel Noriega at the end of the 1980s. The Nobel Peace Prize for Machado was announced on October 10, at the height of tensions between Venezuela and the United States due to the military deployment ordered by Donald Trump in Caribbean waters bordering Venezuela.
The mystery surrounding the opponent’s arrival in Norway has entered as another variable in some analyzes of the threats that the White House has launched regarding a possible US intervention against Maduro, as Trump has hinted on numerous occasions. It also anticipates new unknowns, such as the possibility that the leader, constantly in the target of Chavismo, can return to her country or if she will continue her fight, at least for the moment, from exile. “He is about to make the most important political decision of his life,” Ryan Dubé wrote for The Wall Street Journal.
The number two of Chavismo and Minister of the Interior, Diosdado Cabello, has been ensuring for weeks that María Corina Machado would have already made that decision and that she would have left the country. “We are going to miss her,” he said ironically in one of his last programs where he released information about his supposed departure. “The team has been installed in Norway for days. And although the media machinery is telling the story that no one knows where it is, the reality is less poetic. The woman left the hairdresser with the same elegance with which Edmundo González managed his express departure from the country. No disappearance or drama, pure manual logistics and planes that travel in silence with diplomatic immunity,” Cabello revealed last week.
Chavismo has speculated about the decrease in his messages on social networks and even about the clothes he was wearing in the last video. Appearing with a dark jacket, Cabello assured that he would already be wearing winter clothes, because he would be in another country.
Machado’s entourage has been persecuted hand to hand, to the point that more than a hundred of the collaborators of his party, Vente Venezuela, have been arrested by Chavismo’s intelligence services. This persecution led the leader to go underground and reduce face-to-face contacts with her team to almost zero. Cabello has also spread the thesis that Machado has remained hidden in the United States embassy, located in the Valle Arriba urbanization in Caracas, which has been without diplomatic personnel since 2019, and around which Chavismo has deployed its police forces.
“We are working, doing everything, so that when the day comes we can meet in Norway,” Machado declared last week to the Norwegian network NRK. The spokesperson for the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Erik Aasheim, told the Efe Agency that they had had communication with her on Friday night and that she had confirmed that her intention was to collect the prize in person. Sources from the organization, from the Venezuelan opposition in exile and from Machado’s entourage have said in recent days that the viability of Machado’s arrival is analyzed one day at a time and they handle every detail with extreme secrecy so as not to put the security of the Nobel Prize at risk.
The delivery ceremony is scheduled for Wednesday at one in the afternoon (local and mainland Spain time, eight in the morning in Caracas) at Oslo City Hall. At 5:45 p.m. the traditional torch procession will begin, a march that takes place every year in honor of the winners and starts from the Nobel Peace Center to conclude in front of the balcony of the suite where the person recognized with the award stays. At seven in the evening an honorary banquet will be held with 200 guests, led by high representatives of the Government and the Norwegian crown. On Thursday, Machado is invited to meet with members of Parliament and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store at the Storting, the Nordic country’s legislative body. The big thing to confirm is the attendance of the protagonist of this year’s award.
