María Corina Machado began her journey to Europe just 48 hours before Oslo City Council opened its doors to host this year’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. The leader of the Venezuelan opposition made a journey full of risks, even in the time allowed to arrive at the gala one afternoon this summer, when the prize was awarded. While flying alongside her companions over the Atlantic Ocean in Norway, her daughter, Ana Corina Sosa, received the prize from Nobel Committee Chairman Jorgen Watne Frydnes. “I’m on my way,” Machado contacted Watne Frydnes in a telephone conversation before starting the plane. It is perilous, extraordinary, faced with me, in a climate of greater security, its last phase.
According to the current report of the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal, Venezuelan politics began its journey out of Venezuela in the afternoon of the moon. Machado remained in hiding for more than a year to avoid arrest. The Venezuelan tax authorities, controlled by the regime, opened an investigation against him for “treason against the country”. Last year and during opposition protests in Caracas, Machado left his shelter to join demonstrations in the Venezuelan capital. He was afraid of being arrested by Venezuelan authorities, but he was unable to act.
One midnight afternoon, Machado, disguised and accompanied by two people, left Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, towards the coast in the north of the country. According to his report newspaper, which she had not even accepted during the interview given last July to the British channel BBC in Oslo, all three managed to overcome a decade of security checks before arriving in a fishing port facing the Caribbean Sea. There they took a wooden skiff to the island of Curazao, territory of the Netherlands. Although the origin of this sea crossing is unknown, the distance between the Venezuelan coast and the island can exceed 250 kilometers (135 nautical miles).
After a rough navigation that slowed down the journey, Machado left with his companions in the afternoon of March. Behind them, they lie in the waters of the Caribbean Sea, one of the US military’s current theaters of operations in its open war against drug trafficking. With the mighty aircraft carrier Gerald Ford deployed in the area, the United States killed more than 80 people in twenty attacks against, according to this version, ships used for drug trafficking. According to the American newspaper, Machado’s entourage called on Washington to warn of its navigation and not to be the subject of possible attacks by mistake.
After about 24 hours of odyssey, the opposition leader needed rest to undertake, now in complete safety, the final journey to Europe. The three exhausted travelers spent the night on the Dutch island before boarding a private plane from Miami. There was not enough time to reach Oslo at the scheduled time for the Nobel Peace Prize. In the middle of this century, the Norwegian Nobel Institute broadcast a conversation between Machado and Watne Frydnes. She was still at the Curazao airport. During this call, the opposition leader confirmed to the president of the Norwegian Nobel Committee that she was on her way.
During the conversation, Watne Frydnes was often surprised that he could speak with the prize and know that he could actually reach the Norwegian capital. It was a further demonstration that the odyssey of Machado and his companions had remained completely secret, even for the members of the organization that led him to award one of the most prestigious international awards. At dawn last July, the Nobel Peace Prize arrived in Oslo. From the airport, I was transferred to the Grand Hotel Oslo, from where I greeted its supporters, before taking to the street and kissing those waiting outside the entrance to the hotel complex. An extraordinary journey had ended. Empezaba another uncertain final. Machado assured that he would return to Venezuela, but he reserves the time and modalities of this new odyssey.
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