Univision says it recovered contentious Maduro interview

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - The Univision television network said Thursday that it has recovered the video of a contentious interview with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro that was confiscated after he cut it short, angered by critical questions from journalist Jorge Ramos.

Ramos said the recovery of the video was "a real triumph against censorship" and that it was returned by "confidential sources" who cannot be named out of concern for their safety.

On its website, Spanish-language Univision showed an excerpt of the 17-minute interview in late February in the presidential palace in Caracas. Ramos said the video will be broadcast in full on Sunday.

The journalist and his team were deported from Venezuela after Maduro abruptly ended the interview. Ramos, one of the most influential Spanish-speaking journalists in the United States, had said shortly afterward that Maduro cut short the interview when he was shown a video on an iPad shot a day earlier of young Venezuelans eating food scraps out of the back of a garbage truck.

In the interview excerpt shown Thursday, Ramos offers to hand over a list of what he says are more than 400 "political prisoners" in Venezuela. Maduro refuses to take the list, denies there are political prisoners in Venezuela and says Ramos is trying to provoke him.

The interview came at a particularly tense time in Venezuela, where Maduro is locked in a power struggle with opposition leader Juan Guaidó for control of a country that has suffered from a humanitarian crisis for years.