Machado assures that he will return to Venezuela
The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who reappeared this Thursday in Oslo after more than a year in hiding and after secretly leaving Venezuela, has assured that she will return to her country, although she has not given details of when she could return. “I have come (to Oslo) to receive the (Nobel Peace) prize on behalf of the people of Venezuela and I will take it back to Venezuela in due course. Of course, I will not say when that will be,” he told reporters during his visit to the Norwegian capital. Previously, in an interview, he had assured that he would return despite knowing “exactly the risks” that this entails.
“Of course I’m going to return. I know exactly the risks I run. I’m going to be in the place where I’m most useful to our cause,” the politician said in an interview with the BBC released this Thursday. “Until recently, the place where I thought I had to be was Venezuela; the place where I think I have to be today, in the name of our cause, is Oslo,” he added.
“For more than 16 months I have not been able to hug or touch anyone. Suddenly, in a matter of hours, I have been able to see the people I love most, touch them, cry and pray together,” she added, after landing this morning in Oslo, where she was received by her children and dozens of followers.
Machado has long denounced the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as “criminal” and called on Venezuelans to unite to overthrow him. “The Venezuelan government says that I am a terrorist and that I have to spend the rest of my life in prison, and they are looking for me,” he said. “So leaving Venezuela today, under these circumstances, is very, very dangerous, Machado admitted. “I just want to say today that I am here, because many men and women risked their lives so that I could reach Oslo.”
He was prohibited from running in the presidential elections of the year
last year, in which Maduro won a third six-year term, but the results were widely dismissed internationally as neither free nor fair. “We need to approach this regime not as a conventional dictatorship, but as a criminal structure,” Machado said, accusing the Maduro regime of being financed by criminal activities such as drug trafficking and human trafficking, and reiterating his calls for the international community to help Venezuela “cut off those flows” of criminal resources.
When Machado was asked if he would support a US military attack on Venezuelan soil, given Washington’s recent attacks on suspected drug ships, Machado did not respond directly, but instead accused Maduro of “handing over our sovereignty to criminal organizations.” She stated that she and her team are prepared to form a government in Venezuela and that she offered to meet with Maduro’s team to seek a peaceful transition, but “they rejected it.” (EFE)
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