An Argentine journalist has reported that he was prevented from covering next Sunday’s (28) presidential election in Venezuela and that authorities of Nicolás Maduro’s regime said they will deport him.
Jorge Pizarro said in an interview with the station where he works, Radio Rivadavia, that upon arriving this Thursday (25) at Simón Bolívar International Airport, in the metropolitan region of Caracas, he was separated from other passengers in the Immigration queue.
The journalist reported that he was then questioned by ten different people, who asked him the same questions (such as his origin, profession, where he works in Buenos Aires). Then, 14 photos of him were taken in “different poses”, his passport was withheld and he was taken to an isolated room.
There, according to Pizarro, he was forced to record a video saying the same information he had given during the interrogation. “I recorded [um vídeo de] almost eight minutes. I showed the tickets, the hotel voucher, the [comprovante do] private health system that the radio station hired me for, absolutely everything is in order”, said the journalist.
Pizarro stated that an Immigration official told him that the hotel where the journalist had booked a room “does not exist” and that it took him “an hour” to prove that the establishment “is real”.
“Imagine what the airport is like, the immigration department… they set up a little corral and left me there for three hours. Then they took me to another part of the airport and let me sit there. Until someone came and told me that, because I didn’t meet the requirements to enter the country, they were going to deport me,” said Pizarro, who said that at the time of the interview he was waiting for a flight back to Buenos Aires.
During this ordeal, which lasted six hours in total, Pizarro was unable to drink water or medicine, nor could he “practically” go to the bathroom.
According to information from the newspaper La Nacion, the Association of Argentine Journalistic Entities (Adepa, in its Spanish acronym) criticized the attitude of the Chavista regime in a statement.
“We demand that Venezuelan authorities authorize, without conditions, the entry of Pizarro and all journalists sent to that country to cover next Sunday’s elections,” the entity stated.
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