Venezuelan politician challenges Bernie Sanders to 'go to Venezuela without bodyguards' for a week
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}2020 presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., should take a trip to poverty-stricken Venezuela and explore the country for few weeks without bodyguards, said Venezuelan assemblyman Jose Guerra during a Tuesday interview.
Video journalist Nicholas Ballasy approached Guerra and asked for his opinion about American politicians like Sanders, who refused to label Venezuela a dictatorship.
"I suggest that Bernie Sanders take a week and go to Venezuela without bodyguards, and go onto the street and [use his] cell phone to [see] what's going on," Guerra said.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"They don't understand what is going on in Venezuela," he said earlier in the interview. "This is a dictatorship... [There are] 400 political prisoners. They are persecuted, like me. And it's a new dictatorship, but it's a dictatorship."
In February, Sanders refused to label the country's socialist leader Nicolás Maduro a dictator and said Democratic operations still existed in the war-torn nation, despite crippling inflation and a starving populace.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“Why have you stopped short of calling Maduro of Venezuela a dictator?” CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Sanders.
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“I think it’s fair to say that the last election was undemocratic, but there are still democratic operations taking place in that country. The point is, what I’m calling for right now is internationally supervised fair elections,” he replied.
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Sanders made the comments during a CNN town hall in February, as Univision reported that anchor Jorge Ramos and his television crew were detained in Caracas following an interview with Maduro.
Fox News Joseph Wulfsohn contributed to this report