Abstract
As a decade under Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa comes to an end and elections approach,
Correa has repeatedly said the media were his “greatest enemy”. From the start, he used lengthy Saturday television broadcasts, modelled on the famous addresses by his ally former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, as his main platform. On the surface, the shows appeared to foster transparency and government accountability by detailing the administration’s work and the president’s ideas. But they soon turned into a source of controversy. Over the course of almost 500 speeches, Correa has literally torn private newspapers to pieces, attacked journalists by calling them “wild beasts” and referred to one female journalist as a “horrible little fatty”. As well as the verbal abuse, he has successfully sued media organisations, cartoonists and investigative journalists. “The president decided from the first moment that his fight was going to be against the media,” argued Orlando Pérez, chief editor of the state-owned newspaper El Telégrafo. The newspaper, which belonged to a banker who went bankrupt, became Ecuador’s first state-owned newspaper in 2008. As in much of Latin America, the private media in Ecuador represents strong economic interests and usually adopts a conservative stance. But Correa turned things upside down and has created a large network of state-run media. Pérez claimed that Correa’s fight was necessary in order to guarantee the right to freedom of expression for each Ecuadorean citizen. “Citizens did not have any protection from the media,” he said. Others disagree and believe this was not the motivation for the changes.
When new media laws were approved in 2013, the controversy deepened. Critics say the laws concentrated media in the hands of the government. They accuse the new media watchdogs, which are also under the government’s control, of exercising censorship. The independent media freedom organisation, Fundamedios, which is highly critical of Correa, has calculated that since the laws were enacted three years ago, 398 sanctions have been imposed on media outlets, of which only eight have been imposed on state-owned media organisations. “In 2013 we came under a regime of prior censorship,” Cesar Ricaurte, Fundamedios’ director, told Index. “The government discourse is based on the issue of plurality, but that remains only a discourse. We have more concentration and less plurality. Official propaganda almost entirely dominates the agenda. The private media are cornered and the community media are on the verge of extinction.”
Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa sings during his weekly live broadcast in Manta, Ecuador
CREDIT: AP/Press Association / Martin Mejia
As a result of this restrictive climate, journalistic standards have gone down, said investigative journalist Christian Zurita. He co-authored the 2010 book El gran hermano (The Big Brother), which detailed government contracts benefiting the president’s older brother, Fabricio. As a result, Zurita lost a US$10 million lawsuit filed by the president, who later pardoned him and his colleague. Zurita told Index he used to work on 35 investigative features a year. Now that he works on an independent website, he is down to one a year. “There are things I can investigate, but I don’t get paid for them,” he said. A book like the one he co-authored in 2010 would be unthinkable in the current climate, he added.
“What’s the role of a state if not to guarantee rights?”, asked Paulina Mogrovejo of the National Council for the Regulation and Development of Information and Communication (Cordicom), one of two government-run watchdogs created by the media laws. “It would be wrong for the state to have weak public policies. Information is the most sensible common good.” Mogrovejo said that the laws’ four main objectives were to avoid concentration of media and to give more representation to minorities, improve quality, fight against discriminatory programmes and promote Ecuadorean content. Among other things, the 2013 laws redistribute frequencies for radio and TV, giving 33% to private broadcasters, 33% to state media, and 34% to community radio stations run mainly by indigenous groups. But Fundamedios said that the assignation of frequencies, which is currently ongoing, is not truly pluralistic. “There is no transparency in the process, and there are no places for those critical of the government,” Ricaurte claimed.
Criticism comes even from within Correa’s own circle. “We’re starting to feel a lack of plurality,” said Samuele Mazzolini, an Italian-Ecuadorean academic at the University of Essex and former government consultant under Correa. “There is a growing unwillingness towards debate and dialogue.” After he stopped working for the government, Mazzolini published a weekly column in El Telégrafo in which he often criticised Correa and his policies.
But in September 2016, he resigned because of another El Telégrafo article which caused a stir: a piece by Anne-Dominique Correa, the president’s daughter, who studies political science in France. The article, headlined The Art (or Science) of Disqualifying Democracies, criticised democracy rankings, questioning their Eurocentric worldview vis-a-vis Latin American governments. Pérez, the paper’s editor, said it was Correa’s daughter who sent him a copy of the piece, which was initially in French. “Correa would never call me directly,” he told Index. “It would have been an act of censorship not to publish the piece just because it was written by the president’s daughter.”
The column caused a stir. “When the daughter of a president publishes her third-year university homework uncritically supporting her dad’s theses in the pages of the state-owned newspaper amid magniloquent publicity, then I suspect that some sort of degeneration has taken place,” Mazzolini wrote on Facebook. This led to disparaging attacks over social media, with the president himself stepping in and referring to Mazzolini as a “little clown”.
The next column Mazzolini wrote for El Telégrafo was not published. When he asked why, he was told his position was being assessed by the paper’s editorial board. That is when he resigned. “Within the government party there is an asphyxiating atmosphere. Criticism is lived like an insult,” Mazzolini explained.
The internet has also turned into a battlefield. Fundamedios has studied tweets by several government users, including Correa, highlighting more than a thousand insulting or menacing messages against the media. Spanish company Ares Rights, which was allegedly acting on behalf of the government, had several Twitter accounts and websites critical of the government suspended using US copyrights laws. Online magazines such as the independent news site, 4pelagatos, have reported online attacks.
The government has also clamped down on whistleblowers, in apparent contradiction to the decision to grant asylum to the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in 2012, who faced arrest in the UK and possible extradition to Sweden on charges of sexual assault. Correa has said he was offering support to the Australian anti-secrecy campaigner on humanitarian grounds, to defend him from the threat of political persecution. But things are not so simple.
“Correa took in Assange because of a genuine desire to back a progressive cause, and because he was on the same page as Assange in terms of his aversion towards the USA. However, there was no genuine desire to make the workings of the state more transparent,” said Mazzolini.
“It was a huge propaganda operation and now it remains a hot potato the government doesn’t know how to deal with,” said Ricaurte. Hacking or leaking documents is illegal in Ecuador. Ricaurte mentions the case of Fernando Villavicencio, a journalist who wrote a series of investigative features alleging cases of corruption within the state-run Petroecuador oil company. Villavicencio also leaked documents, including some regarding
Assange’s difficult stay at the embassy and plans to escape. Correa sued him and Villavicencio now faces charges of hacking and a possible prison sentence of up to five years for contempt of court.
As the elections come closer, everybody’s eyes are now on Lenín Moreno, the governing party candidate who served as vice-president under Correa. Although the opposition is divided among many candidates, it is unclear whether Moreno has enough backing to win in the first round of voting, since polls show that Correa’s credibility has gone down. A run-off vote could further complicate Moreno’s chances.
Even within Correa’s own camp, opinions vary as to how much the upcoming elections can change the current situation. Mogrovejo, of the national media watchdog Cordicom, believes that Correa’s policies are here to stay. “The victories we have achieved through the media laws are backed by the entire Ecuadorean society, and they will be defended by the audiences which are every day more critical of the junk TV that private media impose,” she argued.
Critics of Correa believe that even if the opposition were to win and the next president were to scrap the media laws, there would still be much more to do in order to create a healthy media scene in Ecuador. “We need a change of paradigm in order to recover good journalistic practice after years of silencing and self-censorship,” said Zurita. He said his hope lies within the independent websites such as Plan V, 4pelagatos, Focus and MilHojas which have emerged over the past few years as the only platforms for criticism and reports investigating the government. “Despite bad news and difficulties, there are readers that want to find out about important issues,” he said.