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Venezuela’s opposition leader María Corina Machado, in a tacit endorsement of US pressure on President Nicolás Maduro, has called on the world to cut the flow of money from drugs, arms and human trafficking that she claimed were propping up the country’s authoritarian regime.
Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize on Wednesday, told reporters in Oslo that she was “very hopeful” that Venezuela would be free, adding: “It’s going to be soon.”
Asked about US forces seizing an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, which attorney-general Pam Bondi said was transporting sanctioned oil, she answered: “Some people talk about an invasion in Venezuela, and I answer that Venezuela has already been invaded.”
She said: “We have Russian agents, Iranian agents, terrorist groups such as Hizbollah, Hamas operating freely in accordance with the regime, we have Colombian guerrillas, the drug cartels . . . So we ask the international community to cut those sources because the other regimes that support Maduro and the criminal structure are very active.”
Russia has been an important source of weapons for Venezuela over the past two decades and Iran has helped Maduro to rebuild oil refineries. Colombia’s Marxist ELN guerrillas operate from bases inside Venezuela and are involved in cocaine smuggling, according to US and Colombian officials.
Machado, who has lived in a secret location inside Venezuela for the past 16 months to evade the regime’s security forces, slipped out of the country in disguise to travel to Oslo, where she missed the Nobel Prize ceremony but arrived early on Thursday to an enthusiastic welcome.
The head of the Nobel Committee, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, called on Maduro to resign on Wednesday, in unusually pointed public comments. Machado also met Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, who offered his support to her struggle.
But the prize has also caused some controversy in Norway, with two leftwing parties criticising the award and Machado’s seeming acceptance of US pressure on Maduro. Reporters estimated several hundred people protested against Machado’s prize in central Oslo on Thursday.
Machado said that she could not sleep after landing in Oslo just after midnight as she greeted her three children for the first time in almost two years, following a long and perilous escape from her country.
The opposition leader slipped away from her hiding place inside Venezuela and travelled with trusted helpers by land to the Caribbean coast, dodging numerous regime checkpoints along the way, according to a person close to her.
After reaching the sea, Machado boarded a modest boat, which took her about 40 miles in bad weather to the nearby Dutch island of Curaçao, where she boarded a jet for the journey to Oslo, the person added.
The uncertainty surrounding the journey meant that Machado’s team was constantly changing plans, unsure until the last moment whether she would get to Oslo and at what time. Details of her journey were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
During her news conference on Thursday, Machado also underlined how Norway — the leading oil and gas producer in western Europe with the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund financed by its petroleum revenues — was “an example” to Venezuela. She said she wanted to turn her country into an “energy, technological, and democracy hub of the Americas”.
Machado said that the Maduro regime had been sustained by “a very powerful and strongly funded repression system. Where do those funds come from? From drug trafficking, from the black market for oil, from arms trafficking, from human trafficking. We need to cut those flows. Once it happens and repression is weakened, it’s over. Because it’s the only thing the regime has left — violence and terror.”
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