This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado from Venezuela will not attend the awards ceremony in Oslo following threats from her country’s authoritarian leadership. She is not in Norway and will not be on stage at the awards ceremony, the director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Kristian Berg Harpviken, told radio station NRK.
Machado’s former campaign leader Magalli Meda ruled out a few days ago that the 58-year-old Machado could remain in exile. This is “completely impossible,” Meda said in an online video. “It’s like telling a mother to stop loving her children,” Meda said. Machado will “do what she has to do” and is “very aware that her strength comes from the trust that the country has given her.”
Machado is to be honored with the Nobel Prize as “one of the most unusual examples of civil courage in Latin America in recent times.” Because her life is threatened, she lives underground.
Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek William Saab threatened in November that he would consider Machado a “fugitive” if she attended the Nobel Prize ceremony. He justified this by saying that there were numerous criminal investigations underway against the opposition for “conspiracy, incitement to hatred and terrorism”. She is also being investigated for her support for the deployment of US forces in the Caribbean.
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