“17 minutes with the dictator”, Jorge Ramos reveals details of his interview with Nicolás Maduro in a book

The journalist ofUnivision Jorge Ramos He recently published a book in which he recounts the interview he conducted two years ago with the ruler of Venezuela,Nicolas Maduro, which the latter ended abruptly after several tense moments.

The conversation, which they held on February 25, 2019, lasted just 17 minutes before Maduro ended it, after the journalistwill show you images of Venezuelans eating garbage. The book is a story of before, during and after the meeting.

From the interview it emerged17 minutes: Interview with the dictator, which went on sale in the United States on Tuesday. Ramos' profits from the book will go entirely to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to help Venezuelans who have fled their country of origin and settled in Colombia.

Ramos and his teamThey were arrested after the interview was interrupted, their work tools were confiscated - including the card on which the dialogue was recorded -, to be deported the next day to the United States.

After a few months,Univision He recovered the recordings through people close to the ruler, whose identities to date have not been revealed.

“As an interviewer, my main concern was to avoid a soft and complacent interview with the person responsible for fraud and deaths. It wouldn't be good journalism and I would never forgive myself for it,” Ramos says in a chapter of the book, where he explains how the interview began.

17 minutes…It is the 15th book published by journalist Jorge Ramos, 63 years old, who has served 35 of them on the television networkUnivision.

“I thought with what face I was going to return toUnivision to talk to young journalists if he did not say harsh words, because when one has the possibility of confronting dictatorial power, one cannot waste the opportunity,"he said in statements to the agencyWHICH.

Ramos describes Maduro as someone “evil” who lives in “a bubble,” isolated from reality, and who “believes his own lies.” Before the interview, the communicator made people angryDonald Trump when he was president of the United States, in a press conference with a question about his anti-Latino rhetoric.

For this reason,Ramos believes that Maduro accepted the interview considering that, if he was not a supporter of Trump, then he could be a friend of Chavista Venezuela, something that was ruled out after the very beginning of the dialogue, in which the Mexican journalist refers to the ruler as a “dictator.”

When explaining his position regarding the conversation, Ramos assured that in the face of “dictatorships” a journalist cannot and should never be “neutral.”

“We must take sides.Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence motivates the one who torments, not the tormented. Sometimes we must intervene,” the journalist recommends in his book.