Jorge Ramos Detained After Questioning Venezuelan pres

Brut America

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.

Transcript

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?

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