The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who is thought to have been living in hiding in her country, will travel to Norway next week to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, according to a Norwegian official.
“I’ve been in contact with Machado, and she confirms that she will be in Oslo for the ceremony,” said Kristian Berg Harpviken, the head of the Nobel Institute, which helps select the recipient of the prize. “Given the security situation, we cannot say anything more about when and how she will be arriving.”
The trip to Oslo, Norway’s capital, for Wednesday’s ceremony holds significant risks for both Ms. Machado and the movement she heads, which has long been trying to unseat Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro.
Venezuela’s government has said she would be considered a fugitive if she left the country, and it is not clear whether the Venezuelan authorities would allow Ms. Machado to return without being arrested.
It is also unclear exactly how Ms. Machado could travel from Venezuela to Norway without being apprehended. “We are working to ensure that she can effectively attend,” Santiago Romero, a spokesman for Ms. Machado, said Saturday in a message. “I do not have many more details on the matter, as those logistics are being handled confidentially.”
Ms. Machado, 58, became a political activist in the early 2000s and a founder of Súmate, a voter rights group that led a failed effort to recall Hugo Chávez, who founded Venezuela’s modern socialist movement and died in 2013.
She won a seat in the National Assembly in 2010 and emerged as a broadly admired lawmaker who tried unsuccessfully for years to dislodge Venezuela’s leftist leaders through elections. She is a member of a prominent Venezuelan family whose company, Sivensa, is a large steel producer; Venezuela’s government expropriated some of its operations.
In recent years, Ms. Machado united an often fractious opposition, but the Venezuelan authorities blocked her from running for president in 2024. She shifted her strategy to backing a surrogate, a little-known former diplomat named Edmundo González, who went on to trounce Mr. Maduro last year, according to vote counts confirmed by independent monitoring organizations like the Carter Center.
Nevertheless, Venezuelan officials declared Mr. Maduro the winner. Mr. Maduro’s government followed with a sweeping campaign of repression against those challenging his administration’s interpretation of the election. The authorities said they arrested more than 2,000 people for taking part in protests over the disputed election.
The Nobel committee said it selected Ms. Machado to support her work in promoting democracy in Venezuela. But she has also become a somewhat controversial choice for the peace prize after expressing enthusiastic support for the Trump administration’s military pressure campaign targeting Mr. Maduro.
“I believe the escalation that’s taken place is the only way to force Maduro to understand that it’s time to go,” Ms. Machado told Bloomberg News in October.
As part of this strategy, Ms. Machado has refused to criticize the deadly U.S. strikes on boats that the Trump administration claims were carrying illicit drugs. A broad range of legal experts on the use of military force say the strikes are illegal because the U.S. military is not allowed to intentionally target civilians who pose no threat of imminent violence.
The administration has argued that the strikes are lawful because the president determined that the United States is in an armed conflict with drug cartels.
Starting with an attack on Sept. 2, the Trump administration has carried out 22 strikes in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific, killing at least 87 people. Members of the U.S. Congress have been scrutinizing a follow-up strike on Sept. 2, which killed survivors, with some saying it may have amounted to a crime.
Ms. Machado has also faced criticism that she is promoting exaggerated claims and falsehoods to justify a U.S. military intervention. She recently amplified debunked claims that Mr. Maduro rigged elections in the United States, and has argued that Mr. Maduro simultaneously heads two different drug-trafficking organizations threatening U.S. national security.
While longtime experts on Latin America’s drug trade agree that figures in Venezuela’s military have been involved in drug smuggling, some doubt these organizations are actually transnational drug cartels. Venezuela has a relatively minor role in the narcotics trade compared with Colombia, Mexico or Ecuador.
Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogotá.
Simon Romero is a Times correspondent covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. He is based in Mexico City.
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