María Corina Machado’s presence at Nobel Prize ceremony in doubt after press conference canceled

The Nobel Institute had announced over the weekend that Machado would receive the prize, which includes a gold medal, a diploma and $1.2 million (6.5 million reais). But on Tuesday, the Institute first postponed the press conference scheduled for 1 p.m. local time (9 a.m. Brasilia time), then canceled it permanently. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on October 10 to the leader of the Venezuelan opposition “for her tireless work in favor of the democratic rights of the Venezuelan people and for her fight for a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”

— María Corina Machado herself said how difficult it was to come to Norway — said Nobel Institute spokesperson Erik Aasheim. — We hope she will attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony at Oslo City Hall on Wednesday.

Machado’s former campaign chief suggested Tuesday that the opposition leader had already left Venezuela, but would return.

“How can we think that María Corina will not return and will remain in exile?” Magalli Meda said in a statement published on X.

In November, Venezuela’s attorney general warned AFP that the Nobel Peace Prize winner would be considered a “fugitive” if she left the country.

Family and allies in Oslo

While the protagonist’s fate is shrouded in mystery, family members, political allies and some Latin American presidents await Machado’s arrival in Oslo. In the afternoon, opponent Edmundo González Urrutia, presidential candidate in 2024 and exiled in Spain, and Argentine President Javier Milei arrived in the Norwegian capital. Other conservative leaders opposed to Maduro’s government were also invited to the ceremony, including the presidents of Panama, José Raúl Mulino, of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, and of Paraguay, Santiago Peña.

The ultraliberal Argentine president, an ally of Machado since last year’s elections, traveled to Oslo accompanied by his sister and secretary to the presidency, Karina Milei, and chancellor Pablo Quirno. In 2024, Milei again called Maduro a dictator and demanded that he “acknowledge defeat after years of socialism, misery, decadence and death.” Open criticism of the Chavista regime has been a fundamental part of Argentina’s foreign policy throughout his term in office.

At the Grand Hotel, where Nobel laureates usually stay, the laureate’s mother, Corina Parisca, her sisters and at least two of her three children said they did not know where she was but were confident she would arrive.

— God willing, it will happen — repeated family members and anonymous admirers who waited outside the hotel to see “if she would show up.”

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Draped in a Venezuelan flag, Helvin Urbina, a 53-year-old former Venezuelan official living in Spain, spent Tuesday waiting for “the heroine, the iron woman.” But for some, that price tag is overshadowed by Machado’s support for U.S. military operations in the Caribbean and Pacific, which have killed at least 87 people in attacks on boats identified by Americans as suspected of drug trafficking.

— Venezuela needs your leadership and the international coalition that has been formed (…) and which cuts off the sources of criminal financing that support this regime — declared Machado in an interview with AFP after the announcement of the reward.

Like her, Noboa acts as an ally of American President Donald Trump and supports American military actions in the region and even called a referendum to consult Ecuadorians on the possibility of installing foreign military bases in the country. The proposal, however, was rejected by voters. This Tuesday, the American president declared in an interview with Politico that Maduro’s days in power “are numbered.”

In Oslo, peace groups and figures from the Norwegian left demonstrated this afternoon in front of the Nobel Institute, with the slogans: “No Nobel Peace Prize for warmongers” and “United States, hands off Latin America!”.

At the Nobel Peace Center, the museum dedicated to the prize, there is the exhibition “Democracy at the Limit”, in honor of the trajectory of the Venezuelan leader. The venue’s exhibitions manager, Henrik Treimo, admitted to Bloomberg that Machado’s selection as the 2025 winner had attracted “unusual attention and strong reactions” and acknowledged that the award “had provoked debate and criticism in Norway and internationally.”

An engineer by training, Machado went into hiding after the July 2014 presidential elections, which led to the re-election of the Venezuelan president. The opposition leader, barred from running in the election, claimed Maduro rigged the election against his candidate, Edmundo González, and published copies of votes cast in electronic voting machines as proof of fraud. Chavismo has rejected these accusations, but the United States, the European Union and several Latin American countries do not recognize his re-election.

Machado has not appeared in public for 11 months, since he took part in a protest in Caracas against Maduro’s inauguration for his third term.

On the same day as the Machado Prize ceremony, Chavismo will organize demonstrations in Caracas, Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello announced on Monday. When asked about the winner’s trip to Norway, Cabello said: