Nobel Peace Prize winner Machado vows Venezuela return to fight Maduro ‘tyranny

After secretly fleeing her country, Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado said Thursday she would do her best to return to Venezuela to end the “tyranny” of President Nicolas Maduro.

Machado, 58, was speaking in Oslo, where she received the peace prize after spending nearly a year in hiding and defying a decade-long travel ban in a journey fraught with pitfalls.

She won the prize in October for her work as a leading opponent and dissident of Maduro’s government, which faces a growing campaign of military pressure from the United States.

Although Machado failed to reach the Norwegian capital in time for Wednesday’s official ceremony – her daughter collected it in her place – she vowed to bring the prize back to her homeland.

“I came to receive the award on behalf of the Venezuelan people and I will bring it back to Venezuela at the appropriate time,” she said as she left the Norwegian Parliament. “Of course, I won’t say when it will happen.”

She said she hoped “we will transform the country into a beacon of hope, opportunity and democracy,” thanking both her fellow activists in Venezuela and the people of Norway.

Machado added that she did not believe the government knew “where I was” throughout her time in hiding. “They certainly would have done anything to stop me from coming here,” she said.

Machado called the operation to get her out “quite an experience” but declined to give details so as not to endanger “all these men and women who are risking their lives so that I can be here today.”

She said she hadn’t seen her children in two years and described the reunion as “one of the most extraordinary spiritual moments of my life.”

The day before her speech, she made a surprise and emotional appearance on the balcony of the Grand Hotel in Oslo, where she greeted the crowd and joined them in singing the national anthem.

Machado’s choice drew widespread criticism as well as praise, after she dedicated her award to President Donald Trump, whose strategy on Venezuela she supports.

Alongside supporters on the streets of Oslo, there were also demonstrators outside the city’s Nobel Institute, with signs reading “No peace prize for warmongers.”

Hours before his speech in Norway, the U.S. military seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela as the administration continues to ramp up military activities in the region.

At a press conference alongside Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store, Machado was asked if she would support a US military intervention in Venezuela.

“People talk about invasion in Venezuela, threat of invasion in Venezuela. And I say Venezuela has already been invaded,” she said.

“We have Russian agents, we have Iranian agents, we have terrorist groups like Hezbollah, Hamas that operate freely in agreement with the regime,” she said. “We have the Colombian guerrillas, the drug cartels that have taken over 60% of our populations, and that involve not only drug trafficking, but also human trafficking, prostitution rings.”

She said these networks had “transformed Venezuela into the criminal hub of the Americas”, with drug, arms and human trafficking, alongside the oil black market, financing the regime’s “system of repression”.

Without mentioning Trump by name, she said she had “asked the international community to reduce these forces.”

The protesters’ criticism is shared by the Venezuelan government, which denies any involvement in crime and accusations of authoritarianism.

Jorge Rodríguez, speaker of the Venezuelan parliament, said this week that giving the Nobel to someone “who calls for military action against Venezuela and celebrates the killing of human beings in the Caribbean” showed “the hypocrisy of peace organizations.”

The seizure of the American tanker constitutes “blatant theft” and “an act of international piracy,” Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil Pinto said on social media.