Touchy "beast"

The role of the head of Ecuador in the scandals around Julian Assange and Edward Snowden

A year ago, Ecuador agreed to host WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at its embassy in the UK. And today, the same country is at the epicenter of the Edward Snowden scandal as one of his likely haunts.

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, a graduate of the University of Illinois (USA) with a doctorate in economics, considers himself, like the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales, to be "socialists of the 21st century." Almost immediately after winning the elections in November 2006, he went to aggravate relations with the United States: one of the first steps of Correa was to break the contract for hydrocarbon production in Ecuador with the American oil giant - Occidental Petroleum. Its assets were transferred by presidential decree to the Ecuadorian state oil company Petroecuador.

But the real storm broke out in early 2011, after the WikiLeaks website published the secret correspondence of American diplomats. In one cable, then-U.S. Ambassador to Quito Heather Hodges lambasted Correa for appointing General Jaime Hurtado Vaca, "a corrupt and bribe taker involved in human trafficking," as chief of police. Hodges claimed that Correa was fully aware of the scams involving his police chief. In April 2011, Hodges was declared persona non grata by Ecuador and expelled from the country. “The Ambassador was unable to prove her accusations against our president,” Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño said at the time, referring to the diplomatic dispatches declassified by WikiLeaks.

Another fit of rage with Correa happened after he was placed on the table declassified by the same WikiLeaks official records of the former US Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere Thomas Shannon - in one of them he talked about a conversation with the head of the Spanish Foreign Ministry (in 2010-2011) Trinidad Jimenez and Deputy Prime Minister Bernardino Leon. The troika discussed the possibility of Madrid mediating efforts to mend relations between the United States and left-wing populist regimes in Latin America. Leon spoke separately on Ecuador, calling Correa "a purely negative character" who needs a "good mentor" in the region. Shannon agreed with his interlocutor and added harshly: Correa is an uncontrollable "beast", a person "prone to barbarism", with whom it is practically impossible to agree on anything. The diplomat had in mind not only the willfulness of the Ecuadorian leader, but also the repression of opposition activists and independent journalists.

Since then, Correa has "carried a serious grudge (against the United States) and has been looking for an excuse to get revenge," notes the British edition of The Week. The first step was the refusal to renew the agreement with the Pentagon for the lease of a military base in the city of Manta. Another opportunity presented itself at the peak of the Assange prosecution: on the evening of June 18, 2012, Correa personally called the Ecuadorian ambassador in London and instructed him to “shelter” the founder of WikiLeaks, who was threatened with extradition to Sweden.

Sitting in the Ecuadorian embassy, ​​a grateful Julian Assange interviewed the President of Ecuador via Skype for the Russian TV channel Russia Today. “The famous hacker and the president were frankly nice to each other: the fact that they sympathize with each other was obvious to many,” says Philip Reeves, an expert at the American National Public Radio (NPR).

Today, Rafael Correa, according to the Washington Post, "dreams of taking the vacant position of the main Latin American fighter against the United States, which was vacated after the death of Hugo Chavez" - the Snowden scandal came in handy. Fox News columnist Roger Noriega believes that Correa can give sanctuary to Snowden, seeking to improve his own image in the eyes of the electorate as one of the main oppressors of free speech in Latin America. After all, during his presidency, he introduced two new articles into the Ecuadorian criminal code - for disrespect for state bodies and insulting the president, nationalized 14 media outlets (of which five television channels), more than once called independent journalists "servants of world imperialism." President Correa's legislative initiatives have been described by the Inter-American Press Association as "the most serious setback in recent Latin American history for freedom of the press and opinion."

Until now, Ecuador, where the US dollar is used as the national currency, enjoyed the most favored nation treatment in trade with the United States, exporting its goods duty-free to the territory of the “ideological enemy”. In 2011 alone, according to Ecuador's trade balance report, of the more than $12.5 billion earned by Quito in exports, $2.3 billion came from the United States. Trade preferences expire in July. The head of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Robert Menendez, announced his intention to seek a review of agreements on preferential access for goods from Ecuador to the US market if the South American state grants asylum to ex-CIA officer Edward Snowden. But on June 27, at the peak of the Snowden scandal, Ecuador itself unilaterally waived trade privileges with the United States in protest against "pressure from Washington."

On Saturday, June 29, the Spanish-language television channel Univision published on its website a copy of the transit documents allegedly received by Snowden from the Ecuadorian embassy. However, Rafael Correa said that this decision was not agreed with the authorities of the country, and the consul who issued the documents would be punished.

The New Times wrote in detail about the new heroes of the virtual world - Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning