“17 minutes with the dictator”, Jorge Ramos revealed the details of the interview which angered Nicolás Maduro

It is the interview that continues to generate news. On February 25, 2019, veteran Univisión presenter Jorge Ramos sat down to interview Nicolás Maduro.. As expected, tension reigned between them.

The interview lasted only 17 minutes. It ended abruptly when Ramos posted on his tablet images of three men searching for food in the trash can near the Miraflores Palace in Caracas. Maduro wanted to cover the footage with his hand and withdrew. At once, the Mexican journalist and his team were arrested, work tools confiscated – including the card on which the interview was recorded –, to be deported the next day to the United States. Their arrival in the country where they reside made the headlines.

But the interview became relevant again when months later Univision recovered the images they thought were lost. Ramos explains the video’s appearance as “a betrayal of the dictator’s environment”, without giving further details (possibly for the safety of those who helped him).

Today, more than two years later, this failed meeting with the leader of the Bolivarian revolution is once again topical because Ramos has decided to publish a book on the subject.

The first thing to understand from this book is that beyond the anecdote of what happened in Caracas in 2019, it is a story that can be taken as a guide on how to talk to a dictator. .

In the book’s postscript, or in what would be the thirteenth chapter, Ramos defines journalism as “the counter-power.”

“We have to take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence motivates the executioner, not the tormented one. Sometimes you have to intervene, ”Ramos says in his book, moving away from the old, practically obsolete precept that journalism should always be impartial.

And there is no false impartiality hidden behind the first question with which Ramos decided to begin his interview with Nicolás Maduro.

“As an interviewer, my main concern was to avoid a sweet and complacent interview with anyone responsible for fraud and death. It wouldn’t be good journalism and I would never forgive myself, ”says Ramos in an entire chapter he devotes to talking about how the interview began. There, he says that he had prepared this question and decided to ask it after long conversations with the president of Univision, Daniel Coronell. “We asked the question: short, to the point and where we knew it was going to hurt. So it was: “You are not the legitimate president. So what do I call him? To them, you are a dictator.

Ramos knew the answer. He had been denouncing the dictatorship in Venezuela for years from Miami. What was not understood is why a dictator, who usually does not give interviews, had agreed to sit for half an hour in front of Ramos.

On the one hand, it was a matter of context. In February 2019, the Venezuelan opposition did not recognize the legitimacy of the 2018 elections and Juan Guaidó was proclaimed the country’s interim president at the head of the National Assembly. Fifty countries around the world have recognized Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela. Maduro had to clean up his image and went to speak to the foreign press.

But again, with so many left-wing journalists around the world who could have been more benevolent to Maduro, why Jorge Ramos?

“Strong men do not speak (…) if they have something to communicate, it is enough to use the media in the service of the State – and of all the others which are under their control – to convey the message, without criticism and without anyone questioning it. But deep down, they know something is missing: credibility. And the only way for their communications to be credible is to speak through an independent media and with a critical or, at least, neutral journalist, ”says the author.

At that time, Ramos made headlines because he was kicked out of a White House press conference after a lengthy question in which he told then-President Donald Trump that his policies was anti-Latino. Ramos thinks Maduro’s environment must have thought that “if he was not a supporter of Trump, then he must be a friend of Bolivarian Venezuela”.

Trump has his own section in the book. Ramos gives his take on the situation in Venezuela and says Trump’s policy was “hypocritical and lying” because “it made Venezuelans believe that the famous phrase” all options are on the table “meant that the states “United whom he thought of an armed intervention in his country, when he had no plan.” Ramos makes it clear in the book that he thinks that the United States should not enter Venezuela.

Towards the end of the book, Ramos recounts another interview he conducted that sort of answers the original question he asked Maduro during the failed meeting. In March 2019, back in Miami, the Mexican interviewed Juan Guaidó via Skype. He decided to start by asking him also what he called him since the dictatorship insisted that Guaidó proclaimed himself president.

“’President in charge of Venezuela by constitutional mandate,’ he told me. And then he gave me the explanation. Article 233 of the constitution says that in the event of the absolute absence of the president (…) the president of the National Assembly will be in charge of the presidency of the Republic. Venezuela’s presidency was officially canceled after Maduro’s monumental electoral fraud in May 2018 and his usurpation of power in January 2019, ”explains Ramos.

“17 minutes with the dictator” is the fourteenth book published by journalist Jorge Ramos, who spent 35 years on the Univisión television channel.

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