After escaping her country in secret, Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado said Thursday she would do her best to return to Venezuela to end the “tyranny” of President Nicolás Maduro.
Machado, 58, was speaking in Oslo, where she collected the peace prize after ending nearly a year in hiding and defying a decadelong travel ban on a journey fraught with risk.
She won the award in October for her work as a prominent opponent and dissident of Maduro’s government, which is facing a mounting U.S. military pressure campaign.
Though Machado failed to reach the Norwegian capital in time for Wednesday’s official ceremony — her daughter collecting it in her stead — she vowed to take the prize back to her homeland.
“I came to receive the prize on behalf of the Venezuelan people and I will take it back to Venezuela at the correct moment,” she said while leaving the Norwegian parliament. “Of course I will not say when that is.”
She said she hoped “we will turn the country into a beacon of hope, opportunity and democracy,” thanking both her fellow activists in Venezuela and also the Norwegian people.
She said she didn’t believe the government knew “where I have been” throughout her time in hiding. “Certainly they would have done everything to stop me from coming here,” she said.
Machado called the operation to get her out “quite an experience” but declined to give details so as not to imperil “all those men and women that risk for life so I could be here today.”
She said she hadn’t seen her children in two years, and described the reunion as “one of the most extraordinary spiritual moments of my life.”
The night before her speech, she made an emotional, surprise appearance on the balcony of Oslo’s Grand Hotel, where she waved to crowds and joined them singing the national anthem.
But the choice of Machado has attracted significant criticism, too, after she dedicated her award to President Donald Trump, whose strategy on Venezuela she endorses.
Alongside the fans on Oslo’s streets, there were also demonstrators outside the city’s Nobel Institute, with placards including “No Peace Prize for Warmongers.”
Hours before she spoke in Norway, the U.S military seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela as the administration continues to escalate military activity in the region.
At a news conference alongside Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store, Machado was asked whether she would support a U.S. military intervention in Venezuela.
“People talk about invasion in Venezuela, the threat of an invasion in Venezuela. And I answer, Venezuela was has been already invaded,” she said.
“We have the Russian agents, we have the Iranian agents, we have terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas operating freely in accordance with the regime,” she said. “We have the Colombian guerrilla, the drug cartels that have taken over 60% of our populations, and not only involving drug trafficking, but in human trafficking, in networks of prostitution.”
She said these networks had “turned Venezuela into the criminal hub of the Americas,” with trafficking of drugs, arms and humans, alongside the oil black market, funding the regime’s “repression system.”
Without mentioning Trump by name she said, she had “asked the international community to cut those forces.”
The protesters’ criticisms are shared by the Venezuelan government, which denies any involvement in crime and the charges of authoritarianism.
Jorge Rodríguez, president of the Venezuelan parliament, said this week that giving the Nobel to someone “who calls for military action against Venezuela and celebrates the killing of human beings in the Caribbean” showed “the hypocrisy of peace organizations.”
The U.S. oil tanker seizure was “blatant theft” and “an act of international piracy,” Venezuela’s foreign affairs minister, Yván Gil Pinto, said on social media.
