Ecuadorian
President Lenin Moreno has made no secret of his annoyance with the
man he refers to a “hacker,” calling Assange “a stone in his
shoe” as Ecuador seeks to restructure itself as a trusted ally of
the United States.
by
Elliott Gabriel
Part
1
For all
practical purposes, whistleblower and WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange is now a prisoner in asylum at the Embassy of Ecuador in
London, facing the torture of near-total isolation from the outside
world and hanging by the thread of the Andean state’s dwindling
hospitality.
On
Thursday, the Australian – who, strangely enough, was given
Ecuadorian citizenship last December – faced a new layer of
precariousness atop his six-year refuge, when Ecuadorean President
Lenin Moreno ordered that additional security assigned to the
building be withdrawn.
According
to Ecuador’s government, the London Embassy will now have the same
level of security enjoyed by the other ambassadorial facilities the
Andean nation maintains throughout the globe.
Since
March, Ecuador has applied new pressure on Assange, beginning with
the withdrawal of Assange’s internet connection. Authorities claim
this move was in response to his “interference,” in the form of
comments on Spain’s repression of Catalonian independence advocates
and British accusations that Russia poisoned an ex-spy.
The move
also coincided with a visit by two top-level officials from U.S.
Southern Command to Quito for discussions to renew U.S.-Ecuador
security ties. These had largely been frozen following the 2009
shuttering of the U.S. Air Force base in the coastal city of Manta, a
major hub of U.S. espionage activity in the region.
Speaking
to Sputnik, veteran journalist John Pilger commented: “It’s
quite clear that this government has deferred to the United States …
But Ecuador is a tiny country, and in the historical pattern has been
pressured massively by the United States, which of course is working
its way right through the governments that might have challenged U.S.
interests in Latin America, from Venezuela to Argentina to Bolivia
and now to Ecuador.”
Beyond
Washington alone, Economist Intelligence Unit analyst Aristodimos
Iliopoulos told Bloomberg that the move is also meant to curry favor
with international financial institutions and extractive industries,
which hope to exploit Ecuador’s resources. Iliopoulos noted: “The
back story is that Ecuador wants to grow again by getting back into
the good graces of international investors in oil and mining
projects. So the wager might be that clamping down on Assange is seen
as a sign of good will.”
Source,
links:
https://www.mintpressnews.com/for-ecuador-favor-with-the-us-is-as-simple-as-sacrificing-julian-assange/242201/
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