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Story highlights
Mexican student Adán Cortés interrupted last week's Nobel Peace Prize ceremony
He says his country's 43 missing students were his "main motivation"
"I am tired of so many injustices that we have lived in Mexico," he says
Oslo police were under fire after he slipped past security at the prestigious event
At a prize ceremony honoring peace, Adán Cortés says violence and injustice sent him rushing toward the stage.
In a matter of seconds, the 21-year-old Mexican student’s face was seen around the world last week as he stood in front of Malala Yousafzai at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, Norway.
“Please Malala, Mexico,” he repeated as he unfurled a Mexican flag on the stage at Oslo’s City Hall, where the 17-year-old laureate was about to become the youngest person ever to receive the prestigious award.
Oslo police have come under fire over the incident, with critics asking how someone who wasn’t on the ceremony’s guest list managed to slip through security checkpoints and make it to the front of the room, standing just steps away from Yousafzai and other dignitaries before security hauled him out of the auditorium.
Speaking to CNN at an Oslo detention center on Sunday, Cortés said he knows it was a drastic move. But he felt like he had no choice and wanted only a few seconds to speak about Mexico’s problems on a global stage.
“My motivation was to show solidarity with all the things that have happened in my country, ultimately, well, the 43 missing students, who are suspected to be dead and burned, that was my main motivation,” he said. “I am tired of so many injustices that we have lived in Mexico, for decades.”
The students’ case has sparked national outrage in Mexico and drawn global attention to the country’s continued struggles to deal with police corruption and drug-related violence.
Authorities have said the students from a rural teachers college were rounded up on the orders of a local mayor, then delivered to the drug gang to be executed. Mexico’s attorney general says the students’ remains were burned at a landfill, placed inside plastic bags and thrown into a river. But so far, only one student’s remains have been identified.
Cortés said he was seeking asylum in Norway, but authorities there have informed him that he’ll be sent back to Mexico on Monday, Cortés and his attorney said.
Before learning that he was getting kicked out of Norway, he told CNN he was scared to return to his home country.
“I do not want to be one more student who disappears and who later turns up dead and the government later says that it was organized crime,” he said.
Cortés told CNN he went through a security checkpoint with invited guests at last week’s ceremony, but no one asked him for identification or stopped him as he approached the stage.
“I was really nervous. I was saying, ‘This is my moment and this is my opportunity to speak out for all the people who I have seen suffer in Mexico,’ ” he said.
Oslo police said Cortés had been fined 15,000 kroner ($2,040) for nuisance and for entering the City Hall illegally.
Even critics who question the appropriateness of disrupting the Nobel ceremony would have done the same thing, he said, “if they had a little bit of empathy toward what all the families of so many people who have been killed and disappeared in Mexico have felt, this desperation and this impotence to not have a way to express themselves and demand justice.”
CNN’s Claudia Rebaza reported from Oslo. CNN’s Catherine E. Shoichet wrote the story in Atlanta.