Mentions personal use of the Bible.

Transcript context

…Your seven years in prison — I’ve read, you had 300 books with you. Which ones were they? Well, I had many books on the history of Venezuela. I also had different oil books, economic books. For example, I had the different books of Daniel Yergin that I reread while I was in prison. I read a lot of Latin American literature, from [Mario] Vargas Llosa to Leonardo Padura, a Cuban who has written masterpieces in the way in which the Cuban society has evolved and that, for me, sounds very close to our case in Venezuela. I also read a lot of Colombian literature. William Ospina, who wrote very interesting books on history and adventure, the way the rivers in South America were conquered — the Orinoco and the Amazon Rivers. I read a lot of Stefan Zweig, a lot of his autobiographies, mainly the books that I had. I wrote the book that you read after a year and a half in prison, but things really changed. At first, I did have access to books, but books became such a cherished thing for me. It was very clear for my captors that it was something that kept me very focused, that they took the books away, and they did it in a very cruel way. I was in a prison cell two by two with the bars, and a meter and a half away, there was another cell. They put all of the books right in front of me. I could not reach them, I could not read them, but they were there. I wrote an essay that I called “The In Prison Books.” It was, in a way, a metaphor of how autocratic regimes keep knowledge, or keep books, or keep discussions away from the people in order to control their minds and the attitudes of individuals. My relationship with the books while I was in prison was a very close relationship. At one point, I was taken away all of the books. The director of the prison — he called himself a Christian. I said, “You should not take away from me the word of the Lord, so you should give me the Bible.” After a couple of days, he gave me the Bible. I read the Bible from Genesis to Apocalypse, and it was a really interesting experience to read the Bible in that way. Reading chronologically the story of the people from Israel and the story of Jesus Christ, for me, was a really interesting and fulfilling experience. I also had the opportunity to write, but then they took my pens and paper away from me. By the end of my imprisonment, I had nothing. I only had my mattress and the few clothes that I had there. I didn’t have a chair, I didn’t have a table, I didn’t have anything. Just so our listeners know, your book is called Freedom Confined: Prison Notes by the Insurgent Democratic Leader of Venezuela. With respect to the Bible, how exactly is it different to read the Bible in prison?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.