Univision journalist Jorge Ramos went to Venezuela to ask tough questions of President Nicolas Maduro. He explains to Brut why it all went wrong — including being expelled from the country.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00For asking questions, they confiscated our cameras,
00:04they stole our interview, they took our equipment,
00:07they took our cell phones,
00:09they detained us for more than two hours,
00:10and then they deported us all, simply for asking questions.
00:22What you expect from an interview with a dictator,
00:24that's what we expected in the interview with Nicolás Maduro.
00:27He is a man who committed electoral frauds in 2013 and 2018,
00:32a man who was accused by his own head of intelligence,
00:36Hugo Carvajal, of having murdered hundreds of young people,
00:39a man who has ended up destroying the Bolivarian revolution,
00:44where there is an inflation of one million percent,
00:47and if we don't ask the difficult and complicated questions,
00:50no one else will be able to ask them.
00:51So that's our responsibility.
00:54And we have to be against power.
00:56When that power is dictatorial, as in the case of Venezuela,
01:01then we have to be equally strong.
01:11In the United States, for example,
01:14I criticized Donald Trump, the most powerful man in the world,
01:17and I still criticize him.
01:18And what happens?
01:19I can go home and I can sleep peacefully,
01:22I can go out by bicycle with my children or go to the supermarket alone.
01:25But I did exactly the same thing with Nicolás Maduro,
01:29and we were censored,
01:31we were arrested,
01:33and we were deported.
01:34There is a value judgment that is made
01:36before entering the interview.
01:38Many times they think that journalists
01:40live in a vacuum.
01:41It's not true.
01:41In this particular interview,
01:43I was going to try to demonstrate with data
01:45that he was a dictator,
01:47that he had violated human rights,
01:49that he had political prisoners,
01:50that he had committed electoral fraud,
01:52that he was screwing up power illegally.
01:55And he had to show that he was a democrat.
01:57That's the tone of the interview I wanted at the beginning,
02:00which lasted 17 minutes,
02:01until I showed him a video
02:03where some young men
02:06were eating garbage from a garbage truck,
02:08and he didn't like it anymore.
02:10He stopped and left.
02:12And at that moment I said,
02:13why don't you answer the questions?
02:15What you're doing is not done by democrats,
02:17that's what dictators do.
02:18Journalists are forced to take sides.
02:21Definitely,
02:22Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner,
02:24whom we recently lost, said
02:26that neutrality helps the aggressor,
02:30never the victim.
02:31And that's absolutely true.
02:33If we remain silent,
02:34we are allowing others to commit abuse.
02:39And it's exactly the same with journalists.
02:41It applies to all human beings.
02:43Faced with racism,
02:45discrimination,
02:46human rights violations,
02:48dictatorships,
02:49we have the obligation to take sides.
02:52If we don't take sides,
02:54who will?