Overview

We Ecuadorians have a fragile memory. We easily forget that the asylum to Julian Assange was granted while the government of Rafael Correa locked up under terrorism charges at 10 in Luluncoto, at 29 in Saraguro, to the Central Técnico or Mejía students, to El Arbolito Park, to the police of the false assassination, to the journalist Fernando Villavicencio and to the hundreds of criminalized and stigmatized social leaders in an unequal fight against a perverse power, this one for freedom of expression.

We have forgotten that the Correa’s government needed to make up its liberties in the face of an international context that looked badly at the Ecuadorian regime and that was pushed to welcome Assange in 2012. International propaganda flooded the work of Wikileaks and Assange with images transparent some arbitrary decisions of the government of the United States, as of its allied countries, and disclosed millions of classified documents. The same did not happen with countries related to this initiative such as Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela or Cuba. Why? Does freedom of speach have favorites?

Assange was associated with governmental leaders of our country becoming a strategic ally of the then ruling party. Since then he has been spying on us. At the same time, while in other parts of the region Wikileaks reported on the links between Odebrecht and high-ranking officials, in Ecuador, a group of journalists was risking their lives in an international investigation that later won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the links of corruption between the government of Correa and the Brazilian transnational. And Wikileaks? What does it matter? For all populism, it is always great to hate.

Assange left because he insulted the ground that welcomed him.