Democracies must be prepared to fight for freedom in order to survive, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Corina Machado said on Wednesday, in a speech delivered by her daughter during a ceremony Ms Machado could not attend.
The Venezuelan opposition leader said that the prize held profound significance, not only for her country but for the world.
“It reminds the world that democracy is essential to peace,” she said via her daughter, Ana Corina Sosa Machado. “And more than anything, what we Venezuelans can offer the world is the lesson forged through this long and difficult journey: that to have a democracy, we must be willing to fight for freedom.”
A large portrait of Ms Machado hung in the Oslo City Hall to represent her. The audience cheered when Norwegian Nobel Committee head Joergen Watne Frydnes said during his speech that Ms Machado would be coming to Oslo.
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The 58-year-old engineer was due to receive the award in Oslo, in the presence of King Harald, in defiance of a decade-long travel ban imposed by authorities in her home country and after spending more than a year in hiding.
But she was unable to reach the Norwegian capital in time for the ceremony.
“I will be in Oslo, I am on my way to Oslo right now,” Ms Machado told Mr Frydnes, in an audio recording released by the Norwegian Nobel Institute.
It was unclear where she was calling from.
“We don’t know exactly when she will land, but some time in the course of the night,” the institute’s director, Kristian Berg Harpviken, told Reuters.
Ms Machado left Venezuela by boat on Tuesday and travelled to the Caribbean nation of Curacao, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing US officials. In the audio recording of her call with Mr Frydnes, she said she was boarding a plane. It was unclear from where.
In 2024, Machado was barred from running in the presidential election, despite having won the opposition’s primary by a landslide. She went into hiding in August 2024 after authorities expanded arrests of opposition figures following the disputed vote.
The electoral authority and top court declared president Nicolas Maduro the winner, but international observers and the opposition say its candidate handily won and the opposition has published ballot box-level tallies as evidence of its victory.
In her speech, Ms Machado said Venezuelans did not realise in time that their country was sliding into what she described as a dictatorship.
Referring to the late president Hugo Chávez, who was elected in 1999 and held power until his death in 2013, Ms Machado said: “By the time we recognised how fragile our institutions had become, a man who had once led a military coup to overthrow democracy, was elected president. Many thought that charisma could substitute the rule of law.”
“From 1999 onward, the regime dismantled our democracy.”
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President Nicolás Maduro, in power since 2013, says US president Donald Trump is trying to overthrow him to gain access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves and that Venezuelan citizens and armed forces will resist any such attempt.
Venezuela’s armed forces are planning to mount a guerrilla-style resistance or sow chaos in the event of a US air or ground attack, according to sources with knowledge of the efforts and planning documents seen by Reuters.
When Ms Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize in October, she dedicated it in part to Mr Trump, who has said he himself deserved the honour.
She has aligned herself with hawks close to Mr Trump who argue that Mr Maduro has links to criminal gangs that pose a direct threat to US national security, despite doubts raised by the US intelligence community.
The Trump administration has ordered more than 20 military strikes in recent months against alleged drug-trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and off Latin America’s Pacific coast.
Human rights groups, some Democrats and several Latin American countries have condemned the attacks as unlawful extrajudicial killings of civilians. – Reuters
