Ecuador's President, Allegedly a Free Internet Icon, Is Happy to Sue the Press

Last week, an Ecuadorian judge required political cartoonist Xavier Bonilla and his newspaper, El Universo, to run a “corrected” version of his cartoon after the government took offense with his first one.

It’s the first time the country’s controversial (if “controversial” is code for totalitarian, scary, and overreaching) Communications Law has ever been invoked. It’s a horrifying thing for free speech and civil liberties in a country that was once fairly good on those issues but has increasingly seen them scaled back under third-term president Rafael Correa.

The Communications Law was originally proposed in 2009 but was never voted on because Correa didn’t have enough support for it in the National Assembly. But after Correa won reelection last February, he was able to get it through the assembly, which is now made up primarily of people from his party. It's been panned from all sides—Human Rights Watch called it an "assault on free speech."

In basic terms, the law is broad enough to allow the government to force journalists and their newspapers to run “corrections” to stories that paint the government in a bad light. Offending journalists can be tried civilly or criminally, and El Universo was also fined two percent of its last quarter’s sales. Until recently, Ecuador was dominated primarily by independent, private media outlets. Under Correa, Ecuador has spent heavily on state-run media and legislation like the Communications Law threaten it further.

In 2002, Reporters Without Borders ranked Ecuador 20th in the world in terms of press freedom, last year it ranked 119th.

“The government has invested a great deal in media, especially TV, amid considerable tension with the privately-owned media, which enjoyed a near-monopoly before Correa became president,” Reporters Without Borders notes. “A national TV station, Ecuador TV, has been created and Radio Nacional has been revived. The news agency Andes and two online newspapers, El Ciudadano and El Telégrafo, have been added to the ranks of the state media, while a dozen privately-owned media, including Gama TV and TC Televisión, have been turned into pro-government media after going bankrupt and being seized by the state.”

I spent a month in the country last summer and met with various journalists there. I asked them what sort of impact the law has had in newsrooms. Several of them said they have self-censored articles or pieces because they’re worried about running afoul of the law, creating a chilling-effect on free speech. Like many media outlets in the United States, private Ecuadorian newspapers are struggling, and one particularly pricey fine could put many of them out of business.

Bonilla’s original cartoon focused on a police raid of journalist and activist Fernando Villavicencio. During that incident, police broke into Villavicencio’s house with machine guns and took his computers, cell phones, and documents. Villavicencio has made his career calling Correa on his shit, and he was once sued for libel by Correa back in 2011. Last week, Bonilla’s “correction” shows a bunch of overly polite police asking Villavicencio for his computers and shows the activist happily cooperating. It’s unclear if the overly sarcastic correction is what the government was hoping for.

So, why care about what’s happening with free press in Ecuador? Let’s think back a few months to when Edward Snowden originally leaked his first documents and fled to Russia. Correa was one of the most outspoken foreign leaders. For a good few weeks there, he was happy to call the United States hypocrites and said world media has “managed to focus attention on Snowden and on the ‘evil’ countries that ‘support’ him, making us forget the terrible things it has done against the American people and the entire world.”

He’s the guy who has been protecting Julian Assange, and the guy who would protect Snowden, too. He was and remains a hero of civil liberties for some underinformed Internet freedom-at-all-costs types.

Meanwhile, Correa was busy proposing to eliminate print newspapers in the country altogether after many editorials there hammered him over his plan to drill for oil in the Amazon.

“Now the big ‘ecologists’ are newspaper businesses,” he tweeted back in August. “We propose that newspapers go solely digital to save paper and avoid so much indiscriminate cutting of trees. We’ll see who is who.”

This is just a reminder that maybe we should step back and see who is who before choosing which political figures to rally around as protectors of a free and open Internet.