María Corina Machado will not attend the Nobel Peace ceremony: her daughter will receive it

“It will be your daughter Ana Corina Machado who receives the prize on behalf of his mother,” Kristian Berg Harpviken, director of the Nobel Institute, told public radio NRK.

The ceremony is scheduled for 1:00 p.m. in Oslo (9:00 a.m. in Argentina), at the Municipality of the Norwegian capital. In addition to receiving the medal and diploma, Ana Corina will also read “the speech that María Corina herself has written”Harpviken said.

Since the award was announced in October, uncertainty persisted about whether Machado would be able to travel to Norway. The opposition leader He has been living in hiding since August 2024 and has not appeared in public for eleven monthswhen he led a protest in Caracas against Nicolás Maduro.

Over the weekend, the Nobel Institute announced that the Venezuelan would receive the prize in person – which includes a gold medal, a diploma and $1.2 million – and organized a press conference and several international interviews. Everything was canceled at the last minute.

Dozens of exiled Venezuelans also traveled to Oslo, as well as Javier Miley and other presidents, including those of Paraguay, Ecuador and Panama

“I just don’t know where it is exactly.”Harpviken acknowledged. Even on Tuesday night he continued to maintain that he trusted his arrival.

His former campaign manager, Magalli Meda, suggested that same day that Machado had left Venezuela and would return.

“How can we think that María Corina is not going to return and will remain in exile,” he wrote in X.

Machado’s absence is not unprecedented. The Iranian Narges Mohammadi (2023), the Chinese Liu Xiaobo (2010) and the Burmese Aung San Suu Kyi (1991) were also unable to attend the Nobel Peace ceremony in their respective years.

In October, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize to Machado—an engineer by training—for her efforts toward “a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy” in Venezuela.

The opposition was forced to go underground after the elections that gave Maduro a third term, results that were not recognized by the United States, the European Union and several Latin American countries.

Machado maintains that Maduro stole the elections from his candidate, Edmundo González Urrutiaand published copies of votes collected from the machines to support his complaints. Chavismo rejects the accusations.