The presence of the Venezuelan opposition member María Corina Machado in Oslo, Norway, to collect the award remains a mystery less than a day before the official events planned for the award ceremony begin, which the Government of Venezuela labeled this Monday as an “auction.”
On Tuesday at 1:00 p.m. local time (the same in Madrid), the first official event is scheduled, with a press conference for the winner at , the same institution that has confirmed to EFE that Machado herself assured that she will travel to the Norwegian capital. Her mother, Corina Parisca, and her daughter, Ana Corina Sosa, have also confirmed it.
However, the whereabouts of the Venezuelan opposition member, who has been living clandestinely in her country since the beginning of this year, remains unknown. His appearance in Oslo would be the first time he has returned to the public eye since January 2025, when by the forces of .
It is also unknown how and when it would have left Venezuela precisely in the midst of the air connectivity crisis that Caracas is going through, without international connections due to the cancellations of several airlines that withdrew their flights due to warnings of the danger of flying over the region from the US authorities, as a result of the in the Caribbean.
The Latin American right supports Machado
Despite the unknown of Machado’s presence, her mother, Corina Parisca, her sister, Clara Machado, and her daughter, Ana Corina Sosa, are already in Oslo, who declared that she is “full of excitement and pride” for the award that her mother will receive. In addition to her family circle, representatives of the Latin American right also travel to Oslo to support the opposition leader.
The Argentine president, Javier Milei, took off this Monday on a special flight that is expected to land on Tuesday at 16:30 GMT, while his Paraguayan counterpart, Santiago Peña, will arrive in the Norwegian capital on Wednesday for the official award ceremony. The president of Panama, José Raúl Mulino, is already in Oslo, where he met with Machado’s relatives.
The confirmed presence of Daniel Noboa, for Ecuador, and Santiago Peña, for Paraguay, all of them conservative leaders, like Machado herself, is expected.
The Venezuelan opponent, exiled in Spain and who faced Nicolás Maduro in the July 2024 elections, when Machado was disqualified from running, is also scheduled to attend Wednesday’s ceremony. The PP congresswoman (very critical of the Chavista regime) will also go from Spain, as will the Latin congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, a Cuban from the Republican Party, from the United States.
Cabello calls the Nobel Prize an “auction”
For his part, the general secretary of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Diosdado Cabello, attacked the award and called it an “auction” that is awarded “to the highest bidder”: “With respect to Oslo, I don’t know. We don’t know anything about that, we don’t participate in that auction,” he stated.
The spokesperson for the ruling party preferred to focus on the pressure exerted by the United States with its unprecedented military deployment in the Caribbean and denounced that the International Criminal Court has not ruled on Washington’s attacks against boats supposedly linked to drug trafficking in the Caribbean and the Pacific.
“She is rude, the silence she maintains in the case of massacres in different parts of the world is rude,” he added.
He also rejected Panama’s intention to mediate between Caracas and Washington in the face of tensions between both countries due to the Panamanian government’s support for the Venezuelan opposition. “There you do whatever the United States says,” he said.
In the midst of these tensions, the revealed that Donald Trump’s Administration reviewed the plans of Machado and his team in the event of Maduro’s eventual departure from power, a plan that proposes creating forces to stabilize the country between the first 100 hours and the first 100 days after the departure of the current president and holding elections during the first year.
According to the newspaper, the opposition team carried out a detailed analysis of the Venezuelan Army and concluded that only a “limited” purge would be necessary, since only 20% of the officers are “irredeemable” and the rest are against Maduro or are apolitical.
This information adds to Trump’s comments that he could soon begin ground attacks against Venezuela, raising doubts about the scope of a possible intervention by Washington under the argument of combating drug trafficking.
