‘No Humanity’: Nobel Peace Prize Winner’s Daughter Slams Venezuelan Regime

Ana Corina Sosa Machado, the daughter of Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, denounced the authoritarian Venezuelan regime in an exclusive interview with ABC News Live on Saturday, submitting that it has “no humanity” after reuniting with her mother.

The younger Machado recently accepted the honor on behalf of her mother this week, who only just left Venezuela and arrived in Oslo, Norway after a harrowing journey.

On Saturday, ABC’s Ike Ejiochi asked Ana Corina Sosa about reuniting with her mother and her life’s work.

EJIOCHI: Anna joins us now for her first live interview with the U.S. News Network. Thank you so much for being here, and welcome now, Anna, you are still in Oslo with your mom right now. Tell us what it’s been like to be able to reconnect as a family and just hug her.

MACHADO: Thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s been quite emotional, because when one dreams of this moment for the longest time and without knowing when it’s going to happen, and quite frankly, sometimes not knowing if it would ever happen again. Of course, I don’t have to tell you, but so that the listeners could understand, I mean, she faced real, incredible, serious threats to her life multiple times, every day while she was in hiding, and so has many, countless of other Venezuelans. So the moment of reuniting is just sometimes it’s just hard to believe we’re still processing in front of us, and after all these days, which have been just such an incredible honor surrounding the Nobel Peace Prize for my family, but for Venezuela as well, right now, we’re truly just trying to be normal again. Just have a few moments of normality. Oslo, we walk around, we enjoy the Christmas lights. We’re cold. I haven’t seen my mother wear a coat in in more than 12 years. She hasn’t left Venezuela in more than a decade, so it’s just been a moment of a lot of surreal instances where we’re just getting a taste of being a normal family again.

EJIOCHI: Anna, talk to us about what all of this means for the people of Venezuela, many of whom are here in the U.S..

MACHADO: Oh, I think first and foremost is the reassertion that my mother just never, never faults in a promise. She told the Venezuelan people clearly that she was going to be here and also and accept this, this award on behalf of Venezuela to honor the struggle that is happening back home that we continue to fight for to free our country. And she did it, and she did it under really extreme conditions with immense risk to her life. And I think, you know, for me personally, I will say it broke my heart when I found out she wasn’t going to make it to the ceremony. As a daughter, I just truly believed she she deserved being there. She deserved to talk to the world, to speak her words, to speak to Venezuelans, and she couldn’t and but if I may say, I think the silver lining in all of this is that it really put attention to the world on the nature of the cruelty of this regime. It is not a normal dictatorship. This is a criminal network that has no humanity, and the fact that she had missed this moment just showed the world what it meant, and the risk she took to get to Oslo, but she risked her life multiple times, and she did it. Not only did she risk her life, but she succeeded. She again showed the world that their regime is not the Almighty, you know, state that they like to portray in front of the world. So I think for Venezuelans, that was a very important moment, but also it was celebration of who we are as people. You know, it’s not only the struggle that we’re going through, but it is also a moment to to bring to the world who we really are. We are decent people, we’re hard workers. We are a land that wants to open its doors once again, a land of opportunity, as we were in the past. And I think it was a moment to celebrate our values, the values of the good Venezuelans, the values of the majority of our people now.

EJIOCHI: Anna, your speech, which was your mother’s words, was very focused on freedom and democracy, but also on political prisoners. Why are political prisoners such an important cause for both you and your mom?

MACHADO: I guess a matter of of human rights, of dignity. We can’t call ourselves a free country, while we have 887 political prisoners in torture centers. As we speak, there is as us as a young as a 16-year-old, 16-year-old girl in prison. Right now, a week ago, a former mayor died in the hands of the regime out of a heart attack who wasn’t given medical care. It is, it is a matter of human dignity. We can’t continue. And this is, this is what we want to insist on the world, that this is not a matter of right or left the or or politics even it’s not even about respecting an election. It is about much more than that. It is about people that have chosen to be free, that are suffering, that are being repressed. There are countless of families that are being separated, and let me tell you, it’s not even the regime doesn’t even go against their enemy, like my mother or a political activist, as as as innocent as they might be. They go against their family members. This is a brutal regime that has no humanity and whose repression has no limit. So we cannot rest until every single Venezuelan and foreigner who is right now on torture centers by the regime is free again every day that passes is another Venezuelan or political prisoner that risks dying under the hands of the regime.

Watch above via ABC News on YouTube.