Jorge Ramos: “I write not to explode”

Gustavo Borges

Mexico City, June 23 (EFE).- Mexican journalist Jorge Ramos, one of America’s most respected Hispanic voices, admitted this Sunday that he writes to get things stuck in his throat and stomach in the face of today’s harshness. the world .

“I write so as not to explode,” the historian said in an interview with EFE about his book ‘This is how I see things: I never told you’, a collection of some of his key passages and a confession of his professional and personal life.

Ramos, a Univision anchor, is recognized for questioning presidents. Nicolás Maduro kicked him out of Venezuela; Donald Trump fired him from a press conference in the United States, and Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was furious because the journalist showed violence escalating during his mandate.

“I was a rebel. I understood that journalism has to do two things: report reality as it is and question those in power,” he admitted.

Ramos’ book, published by Planeta Publishing House, inserts nearly a hundred paragraphs out of more than 1,000 written in the journals, reflecting the ethics of journalism and revealing the human side of the interviewee with his experience as a reporter in seven wars.

Ramos lives in Miami, where many believe anyone critical of Trump is a communist, but when accused by journalist Maduro of being a champion of the right, they run out of arguments, and Mexican López Obrador is irritated by his questions.

“In Miami they accuse me of being a communist; then I ask Maduro and they don’t understand; they call me right-wing, and they don’t understand when I face Trump. That’s the only thing they need to understand. I’ll always be on the other side of power,” he pointed out.

The analyst laments the absence of intelligent men in world politics and misses valuable thinkers of the past.

“We had great leaders in the era of Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan. I want to talk about Desmond Tutu in South Africa; I want to think of great humanitarians, but I don’t see someone like Nelson Mandela telling us where the world needs to go,” he says.

He reflects on America, where his children were born, and recognizes that country has disappeared as a world leader with Presidents Trump and Biden.

“Trump would have been rejected as a candidate elsewhere, but he is the frontrunner for the presidency. A man accused of sexual abuse, with 34 counts of falsifying documents and more than 90 counts of falsifying documents for paying a pornographic actress to interfere in the campaign, disagreed with the results of the last election,” he said.

As a teenager, Ramos was a good 400-meter hurdler, but he was injured. In 1983 he moved to Los Angeles and settled there.

The first years were difficult. He must overcome loneliness, tune his ears and prepare to enter the big league of journalism.

“I broke my nose three times when I was young, but I developed hearing and sight, two important senses for finding stories,” he explains.

In his book, he mocks his painful experience as a runner in the 1997 New York Marathon, knows how to play the guitar, and only shares other people’s stories.

“An insurgent in Afghanistan aimed for my neck and I gave him 15 dollars to save my life; I didn’t write it. I live the experience in two ways, one is what I convey; the other is how I live,” he said. Agrees.

Ramos defines himself as an immigrant and a journalist, however, he says, if he could, he would be the father of Nicolas, Paola and Carlotta.

“No one represents Latino journalism and the diaspora community better than him; he is the face of Univision, the voice of all of us, the transplanted Latin American,” said Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, who wrote the foreword to Ramos’ book. EFE

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