The
recent violation of Assange’s rights as both political asylee and
citizen of Ecuador sends a chilling message to Ecuadorians who are
being increasingly targeted for their political views both within
Ecuador and abroad.
by
Whitney Webb
Part
4 - Expanding the intimidation playbook
These
alleged efforts to target and intimidate not just Assange supporters
in Ecuador but also allies of former President Rafael Correa follow
years of similar actions to intimidate Moreno’s critics, an effort
that arguably began following the imprisonment of former Vice
President Jorge Glas, a Correa ally who was sentenced to six years in
prison in 2017 for his alleged role in a corruption scandal involving
a Brazilian company. Moreno has used the imprisonment of Glas, who
was Moreno’s own vice president at the time, as part of a campaign
to portray himself as an “anti-corruption” crusader, an image
that has been severely undercut following the revelations of the INA
Papers scandal.
Despite
having several health conditions, Glas went on a hunger strike last
year for several weeks in protest of poor conditions and a lack of
access to healthcare. Glas and his family have claimed that the
charges against Glas as well as his poor treatment in prison are
“political revenge.”
Several
months after Glas was sentenced, efforts were made to imprison Rafael
Correa himself when an Ecuadorian judge issued a warrant for Correa’s
arrest that would have led to Correa’s preventive detention while
charges of his alleged involvement in a 2012 kidnapping plot were
investigated. Efforts were made by Moreno’s government to extradite
Correa from Belgium to Ecuador, but were ultimately unsuccessful.
Correa asserted the charges were entirely false and aimed at
preventing any sort of political comeback for the former president in
Ecuador.
More
recently, and soon after Assange’s arrest, Correa was again
targeted — this time by Facebook — which deleted Correa’s page,
which had nearly 1.5 million followers at the time. Facebook claimed
in a statement given to El Comercio that Correa’s account had
violated Facebook policies regarding “the disclosure of personal
information such as phone numbers, addresses, bank account data,
cards, or any record or data that could compromise the integrity,
physical or financial, of the people in our community.”
Correa
later claimed that this had been done to his posts regarding the INA
Papers scandal involving Moreno’s personal finances since he had
highlighted the account number of Moreno’s alleged offshore bank
account in Panama. That account is at the center of the scandal and
is alleged to have been used in money-laundering and other illegal
activities. Past reports published by MintPress and other
outlets have noted that Facebook has increasingly coordinated page
deletions with groups linked to foreign governments, such as the
Atlantic Council and the German Marshall Fund, which both receive
funding from the U.S. government.
Source,
links:
Nearly a year ago, these predictions unfortunately are now reality: https://t.co/gQonJV7uSC— failedevolution (@failedevolution) April 12, 2019
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