The Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado is already in Oslo, but according to the president of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, she will no longer appear on the balcony of the Grand Hotel in the Norwegian capital to greet her followers, since she wants to meet directly with her relatives.
“María Corina Machado is already in Oslo and on her way to get here,” to the hotel, Frydnes told the media and the former deputy’s followers who applauded and shouted “brave.”
“She is going to meet directly with her family, there will be no meeting today,” added the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, who thanked everyone for a “wonderful day,” in which he presented Machado’s daughter, Ana Corina Sosa, with the Nobel Peace Prize when the opponent did not arrive in Oslo on time.
Frydnes indicated that he will report as soon as possible about Machado’s program in Oslo on Friday, who for now planned to go to the Norwegian Parliament and meet with the Prime Minister of the Nordic country, Jonas Gahr Støre, with whom he was going to give the press conference that he missed on Tuesday.
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The arrival of Machado in Oslo, who normally lives clandestinely in Venezuela, occurred almost three days late from his initial plan, due to the problems of leaving his country and the uncertainty about how to later return to the Andean country.
The opposition leader regretted on Thursday in a telephone conversation from an unknown location with Frydnes that she could not arrive on time for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, but assured that she was already “on her way” to Oslo.
“As soon as I arrive, I will be able to hug my entire family and my children, whom I have not seen in two years. And so many Venezuelans and Norwegians that I know and who share our struggle and our effort,” he said in that conversation, which occurred when he was about to take a flight, as he confessed.
His sister and mother, Corina Parisca, are also in Oslo.
If she finally appears before her followers and the media in Oslo after her long trip to Europe, this act would mark the first appearance of the Venezuelan politician in public since January of this year.
In his award acceptance speech read by his daughter, Machado dedicated the award to all the people of Venezuela and assured that they will soon witness the return home of the exiled opponents.
“Venezuela will breathe again. We will open the prison doors and see thousands of innocent people who were unjustly imprisoned come out into the sun,” he stated, and promised to be at the Simón Bolívar Bridge, on the border with Colombia, where he once cried “among the thousands who were leaving, to welcome them back (…).”
Shortly before, in his speech Frydnes urged the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, to accept the 2024 electoral results and resign from his position to lay the foundations “towards a peaceful transition to democracy” in the country, as this is “the will of the Venezuelan people.”
With information from EFE
