A small crowd gathers outside the gates of the Grand Hotel, Karl Johans Gate 51 in Oslo. Security cordons and another group of police officers monitor access to the building. At the bottom of the stairs, glass doors behind which shine tall chandeliers. It’s seven o’clock in the evening and the scene is reminiscent of a moment on social networks: the usual fans are waiting for their star. “Who stays here, Dua Lipa?” » I ask the man next to me. He laughs before answering: “It seems that Nobel laureate María Corina Machado resides here. » As soon as he says this name, the hotel doors open to let in a man who is accompanying an elderly lady in a wheelchair. “It’s Corina Parisca, María Corina’s mother,” someone said, and the journalists hanging around her besieged her to confirm what until that hour was still an enigma wrapped in an enigma nestled within a mystery. “Will María Corina come?”
Last night it was insisted that María Corina Machado would already be in Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and continue her campaign to free Venezuela from the fraudulent government of Nicolas Maduro. But even in the morning, doubts persisted about his presence at the press conference scheduled for early afternoon, which was postponed until mid-morning, triggering a new wave of rumors about whether Machado would leave Venezuela.
Whatever the situation, the question that arises today is what comes next. We don’t know how he will react. If she shows up in Oslo, Venezuela’s opposition leader will almost certainly emphasize that Maduro’s days are numbered, as she has said in recent weeks. But the answer will most likely be shrouded in a fog of uncertainty, like the one that blankets city streets at this dark and foggy time of year. It will be Donald Trump who will make the decision to initiate land action with the navy present in the Caribbean. Faced with growing pressure from public opinion, Democrats and the MAGA circuit itself, it is not certain that this will happen.
Trump has already issued two ultimatums to Maduro without delivering them, which has sparked all sorts of speculation. One of the most logical hypotheses is that before acting, it was strategic to extract Machado from the country to avoid the risk of him being captured by the dictatorship and used as a bargaining chip.
If he managed to escape, this fact must be seen as another ruse by Machado, who a few months ago managed to extract the members of his team who were housed in siege conditions in the Argentine embassy – without electricity or medicine and with few provisions. It is assumed that this escape was carried out with the connivance of the security forces guarding them.
To get to Oslo, Machado built a story for weeks. In several messages on his networks and public video presentations, he assured that he would be present. A few days ago she revealed that she would be accompanied to the Nobel ceremony by the presidents of Panama, Argentina, Ecuador and Paraguay, who today represent the new Latin American right. But beyond that, her departure from Venezuela would indicate that she is stewarding the country’s resources that made it possible, despite the government’s close surveillance of her.
If three characteristics have defined Machado in recent years, they are his sense of political expediency, his strategic ability and his personal courage.
First, she was elected opposition candidate in the 2023 primaries, with more than 90% of the vote. She did so in defiance of a government that prevented her from traveling by plane and harassed her at proselytizing rallies. After his illegal disqualification, he managed to lend credibility to the candidacy of Edmundo González Urrutia in the presidential campaign and coordinated, through the so-called commandos, the civil-military operation that recovered the voting results to demonstrate Maduro’s fraud.
The government wanted her off the streets and pushed her underground, from which she only emerged for a few hours on January 9. In the meantime, it has dismantled its operational structure by arbitrarily detaining its executives and key collaborators throughout the country. But she could not stop the intense activity on social networks that kept her present in the hopes of Venezuelans. More recently, Machado dealt two critical blows to Maduro: Trump’s support and the Nobel Peace Prize, which made her a global symbol of the freedom struggle. (And this mixture of cunning and planning with audacity and even recklessness deserves a parenthesis, because it distinguishes her from all the opposition leaders who preceded her).
However, she fell short of the main goal of freeing Venezuela from a repressive dictatorship to continue working for social justice for the most vulnerable Venezuelans, a fight that began in her youth and which she defined as a transformative experience. It is for this reason that the days, hours and weeks following receiving the Nobel Prize represent a central moment for Machado and his compatriots; They will determine whether she merges her destiny with that of the Venezuelans who placed in her the hope of regaining freedom and advancing towards a new democracy, or whether she goes down in history like others who tried before her but without success.
It is in this afternoon – and not in the Nobel, despite its enormous symbolic power – that the true meaning of his political bet will be played out.
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