Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Corina Machado on Wednesday said that democracies must be ready to defend freedom in order to survive, in a speech delivered by her daughter during a ceremony Machado could not attend.
The Venezuelan opposition leader said that the prize held profound significance, not only for her country but for the world.
“It reminds the world that democracy is essential to peace,” Reuters quoted Machado as saying through her daughter, Ana Corina Sosa Machado, whose voice faltered as she spoke of her mother.
“And more than anything, what we Venezuelans can offer the world is the lesson forged through this long and difficult journey: that to have a democracy, we must be willing to fight for freedom,” she added.
A large portrait of a smiling Machado was displayed in Oslo City Hall to stand in for her, drawing cheers and applause from the audience when Norwegian Nobel Committee head Joergen Watne Frydnes announced during his speech that Machado would be arriving in Oslo.
Referencing past laureates Nelson Mandela and Lech Walesa, he said that champions of democracy are expected “to pursue their aims with a moral purity their opponents never display.”
“This is unrealistic. It is unfair,” Reuters quoted Frydnes as saying.
“No democracy operates in ideal circumstances. Activist leaders must confront and resolve dilemmas that we onlookers are free to ignore. People living under the dictatorship often have to choose between the difficult and the impossible,” Frydnes added.
Machado fails to reach for ceremony
The 58-year-old engineer was due to receive the award in Oslo, in the presence of King Harald, in defiance of a decade-long travel ban imposed by authorities in her home country and after spending more than a year in hiding.
But she was unable to reach the Norwegian capital in time for the ceremony.
“I will be in Oslo, I am on my way to Oslo right now,” Machado told Frydnes, in an audio recording released by the Norwegian Nobel Institute.
It was unclear where she was calling from.
“We don’t know exactly when she will land, but sometime in the course of the night,” the institute’s director, Kristian Berg Harpviken, told Reuters.
‘A choice that must be renewed each day’
“Freedom is a choice that must be renewed each day, measured by our willingness and our courage to defend it. For this reason, the cause of Venezuela transcends our borders,” she said in her prepared speech.
“A people who choose freedom contribute not only to themselves, but to humanity.”
In 2024, Machado was prevented from running in the presidential election, despite winning the opposition primary by a wide margin. She went into hiding in August that year after authorities intensified arrests of opposition figures following the contested vote.
While the electoral authority and Supreme Court declared President Nicolas Maduro the winner, international observers and the opposition maintain that Machado’s candidate secured a clear victory, supported by ballot box-level tallies released by the opposition.
‘Fragile’ democratic institutions
In her speech, Machado said that Venezuelans failed to recognise in time that their country was sliding into what she called a dictatorship.
Referring to the late president Hugo Chavez, who was elected in 1999 and remained in power until his death in 2013, Machado said: “By the time we recognised how fragile our institutions had become, a man who had once led a military coup to overthrow democracy, was elected president. Many thought that charisma could substitute the rule of law.”
“From 1999 onward, the regime dismantled our democracy.”
President Nicolas Maduro, who has been in power since 2013, claims that US President Donald Trump is attempting to overthrow him to gain control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, asserting that Venezuelan citizens and armed forces would resist any such move.
According to sources familiar with planning documents reviewed by Reuters, Venezuela’s armed forces are preparing to mount guerrilla-style resistance or sow chaos in the event of a US air or ground attack.
Dedicated to Trump
When Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize in October, she dedicated it in part to Trump, who has said he himself deserved the honour.
She has aligned herself with hawks close to Trump who argue that Maduro has links to criminal gangs that pose a direct threat to U.S. national security, despite doubts raised by the U.S. intelligence community.
The Trump administration has ordered more than 20 military strikes in recent months against alleged drug-trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and off Latin America’s Pacific coast.
Human rights groups, some Democrats and several Latin American countries have condemned the attacks as unlawful extrajudicial killings of civilians.
With inputs from agencies
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