María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, is travelling to Oslo after a covert exit from Venezuela that prevented her from attending the December 10 ceremony. Her whereabouts had been unclear for much of the day, prompting anxiety among supporters and diplomats, before the Norwegian Nobel Institute confirmed she was safely en route but would not arrive in time to receive the prize in person.

Machado has spent more than a year in hiding inside Venezuela as President Nicolás Maduro’s government intensified arrests of opposition figures following the disputed 2024 election. The former legislator and founder of the centre-right liberal party Vente Venezuela won the opposition primary but was barred from the presidential ballot last year, setting off a standoff that deepened the country’s political crisis. Human-rights groups say those around her have faced surveillance, raids, and criminal charges aimed at dismantling her movement.

US officials familiar with her journey cited by the Wall Street Journal said she left Venezuelan territory earlier this week using an irregular maritime route to reach the Caribbean island of Curaçao, from where she was able to continue her travel to Europe via private jet. The Norwegian side has avoided confirming operational details, citing security concerns, but officials described her extraction as significantly more complex than initially anticipated.

Her daughter, Ana Corina Sosa Machado, accepted the award on her behalf in Oslo City Hall, delivering a speech that underscored both the scale of Venezuela’s humanitarian dislocation and her mother’s insistence that democratic transitions cannot occur without sustained civic resistance. Nearly nine million Venezuelans have left the country in the past decade. Many, Sosa said, continue to believe they will one day return “to a country that is free again,” echoing a point Machado has made repeatedly: that the Venezuelan crisis is not just political but profoundly familial, fracturing households across the region.

In an audio message released by the Nobel Institute, Machado apologised for her absence, saying that “many people” risked their lives to facilitate her journey. The Institute, which has treated her security as exceptionally sensitive, has declined to give details of her route or timing. Norwegian officials expect Machado to speak publicly in Oslo on December 11, assuming her arrival proceeds without further complication.

Her daring escape illustrates the extent to which Venezuela’s political strife has entered a hardened phase. In the months since the July 2024 disputed vote, which international observers widely criticised, the regime has expanded its list of wanted opposition figures and warned that Machado would face arrest if she attempted to leave the country. Prosecutors have alleged conspiracies and destabilisation plots, claims the opposition dismisses as tools of repression.

Machado, 58, has long cast herself as a bridge between Venezuela’s pro-market reformers, the country’s fractured civil society, and a US policy establishment eager to eject Maduro from power. Over the past decade, she has cultivated ties with Washington lawmakers and officials across administrations. Her insistence that any sanctions relief be tied to verifiable democratic guarantees has at times found receptive ears in the State Department and Congress, though it has also clashed with wider geopolitical calculations including oil-market concerns and regional diplomacy, given that Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven crude reserves.

More recently, she has drawn criticism for supporting US strikes on vessels the Trump administration said were involved in drug trafficking off Venezuela’s coast, and for her increasingly explicit calls for US military action to help remove Maduro.

Her Nobel Prize is likely to sharpen those tensions. In its citation, the Nobel Committee praised her “unwavering commitment” to securing a democratic transition and highlighted her work documenting abuses, organising civic networks and pushing for electoral guarantees even as institutional avenues narrowed. Diplomats say the award may complicate Maduro’s efforts to project a softer international image while negotiating limited sanctions waivers and investment assurances with foreign companies.

In her prepared remarks—read by her daughter—Machado warned that Venezuelans had underestimated how quickly democratic guardrails could erode, arguing that dismantled institutions and a culture of impunity were not accidental by-products but integral to the country’s authoritarian slide. She described the fight for democracy as a “daily choice,” a phrase that echoes her earlier writing on the need for opposition cohesion and long-term strategy despite successive setbacks.

Regional governments sent a high-level delegation to the ceremony, including the presidents of Argentina, Ecuador and Panama, underscoring the broader Latin American stakes. Edmundo González Urrutia, the opposition candidate who stood in the July 2024 election as Machado’s proxy, also travelled to Oslo from Madrid, where he has lived in exile since last year. Venezuela’s exodus has become one of the hemisphere’s largest migration shocks, reshaping labour markets, public services and politics across the Andes, Central America and the Caribbean.

Machado has vowed repeatedly that she intends to return to Venezuela, even though exile would likely offer her greater personal safety. “I will be back,” she said in a recent interview, insisting that political change cannot occur if the country’s leaders, such as Gonzalez and former opposition candidate Juan Guaido, remain abroad.