As the conductor of the Univision News, Ramos has covered five wars (El Salvador, the Persian Gulf, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq), and numerous historical events.
The terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid in South Africa and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Ibero-American summits, guerrilla movements in Chiapas and Central America and elections on almost the entire continent. Ramos has participated in several presidential debates.
Ramos has interviewed some of the most influential leaders in the world. Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. Sarah Palin, Harry Reid, John McCain, John Edwards, Al Gore, George Bush Sr., John Kerry, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Felipe Calderon and dozens of Latin American presidents.
If I were to suggest two books to read this year, they would be “Brief Answers to the Big Questions,” by the renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who died in 2018, and “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” by the historian Yuval Noah Harari. Both present lucid insights into what might happen after we die and the stories we tell ourselves to explain why we die.
Someone once asked Oprah Winfrey, the inspirational businesswoman, journalist and actor, this question during an interview: “What do you know for sure?” It caught her off guard, she has said, and she hesitated, not knowing how to respond.
“Look, Ramos,” the woman said to me. She’d recognized me as the guy from TV as we waited for an elevator, and she had something to get off her chest. “I don’t watch the news anymore because all they do is talk about Donald Trump. I’m sick and tired of it. Please change the subject.”
I saw them die right before my eyes: four prawns, twisting over a hot iron griddle.
“I was abused when I was in school,” Juan Carlos Cruz, a Chilean journalist, told me in a recent interview.
At what point did we become desensitized to the shocking news that the bodies of three murdered students had been dissolved in acid? When did we stop searching for the 43 missing college students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico, who disappeared after being kidnapped? When did it become normal for more than 100,000 people to lose their lives to violence in a six-year presidential term?
It was supposed to be a day of love. It ended as a day of death.
I recently went to Los Angeles for two days, and spent one looking back, the other looking forward.
Let’s start with the dreadful part. Since Enrique Peña Nieto became president, there have been 91,284 homicides in Mexico.
I am horrified by how easy it was for Stephen Paddock to kill so many people in Las Vegas earlier this month. After apparently carrying loads of weapons up to his hotel room, he smashed out two windows and then, as if he were at a firing range, aimed at a crowd of 22,000 people gathered below for an outdoor concert.