Venezuela’s Nobel Winner Will Go to Norway for Peace Prize, Official Says

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.
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