Jorge Ramos: Trump's Populism Is Reminiscent of a Latin American Dictator

By John Paul Rathbone, Financial Times

17 September 16

 

hose of us with roots in Latin America know that timekeeping isn’t one of our most celebrated characteristics. There had also been a tropical rainstorm in the morning, leaving Miami’s steaming roads thick with traffic. But Jorge Ramos, who has made puncturing Latino stereotypes something of his life’s work, arrives at 1pm with the on-the-second punctuality of a practised television broadcaster.

We are lunching at Talavera, a Mexican restaurant in Coral Gables, Florida, and today the man sometimes described as “the most influential news anchor in the Americas” wears a casual jacket, plain dress shirt open at the collar, and jeans. Slight and trim, Ramos greets me with a handshake and slings a backpack on to the bench on his side of the booth. “It’s my son’s favourite Mexican local,” the 58-year-old says, his boyish face crinkling into an easy smile.

Ramos occupies an unusual position in US media. Born in Mexico City, for the past three decades he has been based in Miami and has co-anchored the flagship evening news of Univision, the largest Hispanic broadcaster in the US. Watched by 2m households, his 6.30pm show has comparable ratings to equivalent primetime broadcasts on English-language stations such as CBS and Fox. It has also made Ramos probably the most recognised and trusted face among the 55m Hispanics in the US — their Walter Cronkite, although George Clooney may be more apt given Ramos’s movie-star looks and Nice Guy reputation. (The Venezuelan-American Uber driver who delivered me to the restaurant said he considered Ramos “muy señor”, a gentleman.)

Despite the accolades — eight Emmys and a bucketful of journalism awards — most of English-speaking America only discovered Ramos after he was thrown out of a Donald Trump news conference last year. “Go back to Univision,” Trump had retorted when Ramos persistently questioned his plans to deport 11m undocumented immigrants. Security escorted Ramos out shortly after. The scene, premeditated by Ramos, made great TV — “The most artificial medium imaginable,” as he admits. With a long record of defending immigrant rights on television and in print, it also cemented Ramos’s reputation for “giving voice to the voiceless”. More controversially, it kicked off a media storm that impugned Ramos as a partisan anti-Trumper who had abandoned journalistic neutrality, so making his points of view invalid.

“I’ve never seen an election like this before, so I am glad to be 58 now,” Ramos says as soon as he sits down. “I have the confidence and technique to cover it. I mean, what do you do when confronted with a figure like Trump? He seems to me to be one of those cases where you have to take a stand. If you don’t, and Trump is elected US president, you will regret it.”

?…?

Ramos’s childhood nickname was “pote”, short for potrillo or “colt”, and he has been rushing around ever since. Alongside a day job that involves stunts such as strapping a GoPro to his chest and swimming across the Rio Grande, he writes a weekly syndicated column, co-hosts two weekend news reviews in Spanish and in English, and writes books (12 so far).

He talks fast and with directness unusual among Mexicans, better known for ceremonial circumlocution. To try and slow things down a bit, I order a tequila with a “sangrita” rider of spicy tomato juice, and ask Ramos to join me. “Thank you but no,” he says. “I have to drive to work. There is also the show. I have to be careful.” So I sip my smoky Don Julio alone and suggest we order food.

To my delight, chiles en nogada is on the menu. Invented by Mexican nuns 200 years ago, the recipe consists of a green poblano pepper stuffed with finely chopped meat, covered in a walnut-based cream sauce, sprinkled with pomegranate seeds. Ramos modestly suggests the fixed lunch menu but gives in to my enthusiasm. The waiter takes our order (“¿Qué tal, Jorge?” he asks familiarly). We agree on a shared entrée of guacamole, and press on.

I ask Ramos if Trump reminds him of any populist Latin American presidents he has interviewed. “I first met Hugo Chávez in 1998, when he was still wearing a suit and tie. Yes, they do share a populist touch,” Ramos replies. “Of course, it is impossible to imagine a dictatorship in the US. Still, everything Chávez said even then centred around his strength, himself. He said ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’ a lot. You see some of that in Trump.”

At this, Ramos discloses that his daughter Paola, from his first marriage, works on Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He then comments that a distinguishing feature of this US election is its “total lack of transparency, from both sides,” from Clinton’s emails and health to Trump’s unreleased tax returns and lies.

Ramos has always considered himself to be a rebel. Growing up, he stood up against the authority of his middle-class father, an architect; at school, he disobeyed the monks who taught him; and in the early 1980s, he resigned in protest from his first job as a cub reporter at Televisa. Mexico’s biggest broadcaster had long been a flattering mouthpiece for the Institutional Revolutionary party, which wielded total power in Mexico for 71 years before losing the presidency in 2000, and when Televisa producers asked Ramos to censor a critical piece that he had put together on Mexican attitudes to power, he erased the tape before it could be broadcast.

Ramos sold his VW Beetle, moved to Los Angeles, studied journalism at an extension course at UCLA and began working at a small Hispanic station, Canal 34, filing up to three stories a day from the street. “It was a wonderful school,” he once wrote.

In 1986, to his surprise, Ramos became the Miami-based anchor of the evening news show he still co-presents. Since then he has been elbowed in the ribs by Fidel Castro’s security detail after he pressed the Cuban dictator, asking him if it wasn’t time to call elections. He has received death threats in Colombia after he questioned then-president Ernesto Samper over allegations his campaign had been financed with drug money. More recently, he has variously taken Clinton and Bernie Sanders to task, while Barack Obama squirmed in his seat during a 2014 interview in which Ramos described him as the US’s “deporter in chief” for expelling 2m migrants. “All I now do in English is what I’ve been doing in Spanish for decades,” Ramos insists. “I ask questions.”

The guacamole arrives, a handy visual prompt. Ramos turns to his mantra: the Latinisation of the US. He is an enthusiastic cheerleader for this demographic shift, both as an immigrant who became a US citizen in 2008, and as the star of a private-equity-owned Latino company rumoured to be seeking a listing. The purchasing power of the Hispanic market is already estimated to be $1.4tn and it is growing every day.

“By 2044 whites will be a minority in the US,” Ramos says. “They sense this, they feel fearful, and that is why Donald Trump is their symbol, the man who will keep the ‘others’ out. But that’s not the future. This is,” Ramos says, pointing around the restaurant, busy with bilingual custom. “Trump will be the last person to seek the presidency with only the white vote.”

His plate has a barely touched tortilla chip with a dollop of chilli sauce on top. Then the main course arrives: I survey the dish with pleasure but it tastes bland and has no aroma. Ramos shrugs: his senses of taste and smell are impaired after a botched operation on a broken nose. “Can you smell anything? I can’t,” he says. “My mother would probably make it differently,” he adds courteously.

?…?

Ramos’s latest project, a documentary co-produced with HBO that explores hate in America, has taken him around the country. I wonder if in his reporting he found Trump to be a symptom or a cause of the US’s seething resentment? “An important part of the US population is afraid and angry,” he says. I ask if this simply makes Trump the voice of a community that feels threatened, just as Ramos is among Hispanics? “That is just what the Ku Klux Klan said,” is his surprising answer. “They told me: you give your point of view, we give ours. What’s the difference?”

Ramos pauses and presses his forefinger on the table to emphasise the point. “The answer to that question is important. They want to exclude us. We don’t want to exclude them.” Then he adds: “Hate is contagious. It is always the same?…?In difficult times, immigrants get the blame?…?here or in Europe.”

We talk about Latin America. Ramos is optimistic, as am I. “It’s the millennials who are pushing change. They are much less ideological, more pragmatic” than their parents. He applauds recent government changes in Argentina and Brazil as signs that “people will no longer stand for” corruption and mismanagement. He cites Venezuela, where despite government repression “hundreds of thousands of people march for change”. He calls Colombia’s peace deal with Marxist rebels “a pearl”. He is even somewhat optimistic on Mexico: “Rising criticism on social media is a sign of growing independence.”

What about Enrique Peña Nieto’s big blunder last month, I ask. Mexico’s most unpopular president in decades had hosted a private meeting with Trump, Mexico’s most disliked man. It comes as no surprise that, after the sweeping visit of the real estate magnate who has slandered Mexicans as “rapists” and “criminals” and who says he will build a wall along the US border, Peña Nieto’s ratings fell even further. “Peña thought he could win. He wanted to change the narrative,” says Ramos. “His chance was at the press conference [afterwards] when Trump said there had been no conversation about building walls. That was the TV moment. But Peña was meek — or maybe did not understand Trump’s English. Either way, he blew it.”

?…?

At Univision, Ramos has covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as well as conflicts in the Gulf, Kosovo and Afghanistan. His range and experience suggests a bigger, more worldly role than his current job. He has considered going into politics but, in the end, figured he had more influence as a journalist. He says he is occasionally headhunted but, “like a Japanese salaryman”, does not want to leave Univision. “We have ridden the Latin wave together?…?and no owner has ever told me what to say.”

Meanwhile, Univision’s sister network, Fusion, allows him to cross over into the Anglo-Saxon world, following the demographic shift into English by Hispanic millennials and keeping him fresh. His simple secret of television success, Ramos suggests, is to be able to appear natural under lights while wearing make-up. In person, his body language is therefore much as on screen: relaxed and aware. His face is open. He talks in the crisp sentences of TV news and, while his English is accented, his deracinated Spanish no longer locates him as Mexican: Ramos has lived in Miami longer than Mexico.

He calls this city surrounded by swamp and sea his trinchera, or foxhole, and is grateful that it has welcomed him. “Everyone here is from somewhere else, so in a way we all understand each other.” He shares a house with his partner, Chiqui Delgado, a former TV host and Venezuelan beauty queen, her two children, and his teenage son from a second marriage (with an always-available bedroom for his daughter). He exercises a lot and leaves his email inbox empty at the end of every day. Despite the magic trinity of salud, amor y pesetas — good health, love and success — Ramos’s sense of home remains elusive, as it does among many émigrés. In his memoir he wrote that his favourite song is the plaintive 1970 classic by Facundo Cabral: “No soy de aquí, ni soy de allá” (I am neither from here nor there). I mention that my Cuban mother considers this her theme song too and ask Ramos if he believes, like her, that “Ser feliz es mi color de identidad” (To be happy is my identity’s colour)?

Ramos is only momentarily taken aback by the gambit. “I’d say I am more of a preguntón, a nosy busybody. I am also very independent: I grew up in a big family,” he says. “As for home, as a physical presence my old house in Mexico is long gone — but I can assure you that in my house I am rarely alone.” Like all good news anchors, he then brings the show back to script. “Well, I did feel alone when I confronted Trump.”

Ramos notices I’ve not eaten the green poblano pepper, so I chomp it down as the waiter returns. “Dessert?” Ramos chooses a flan. I take a marzipan-based pastry and espresso. Ramos says no coffee for him; “It’s a Cuban habit I’ve not picked-up.”

As the bill arrives, our conversation returns to Trump. In the background a waiter has climbed a stepladder to hang a Mexican flag by the window, ahead of independence day on September 16. Ramos’ face lights up at the dramatic possibilities of the shot. “Trump supporters would hate it, but that is what the ‘us’ is,” he remarks. “Recognising ‘the other’ may only be an idea of French philosophers,” Ramos adds. “But if you do not recognise the other, they will not recognise you. Donald Trump does not do it. Immigrants have to: their survival depends on it.” (Yes, TV presenters can be deep too.)

Ramos shows how exactly backwards Trump is when he slanders immigrants — it’s the best that usually come. Any aspiring journalist should read Ramos’s Pringle Lecture at Columbia University. He is enthusiastic about new technologies without being glib, and convincing, without being earnest, of the need for sensitivity to different accents in an increasingly varied world.

For all his strong opinions, though, Ramos is perfectly polished and rehearsed. There is even something of a boy scout to his earnestness. As one of the most prominent Hispanics in the US, he guards his reputation carefully and is scrupulous to a fault. We discuss the bill, usually paid for by the FT, but split it on ethical grounds. Before we leave, he graciously gives me a copy of his latest book, Take a Stand: Lessons from Rebels, and writes inside, “John Paul: may your voice never go out.”