10 Jan 24 | Americas, Ecuador, News and features
President Daniel Noboa declared a 60-day state of emergency in Ecuador on Monday after Adolfo Macías, a notorious gang leader commonly known as Fito, escaped from prison and prompted a wave of violence in the state. Since then, armed gunmen have stormed a TV station in the city of Guayaquil during a live broadcast, and Noboa has issued a further decree declaring war on armed gangs. While not the first time a state of emergency has been called, this latest could be a watershed moment for a once-peaceful state which has spiralled into cartel-related violence in recent years. Here’s what you need to know:
Who is Fito?
Adolfo Macías, known as Fito, is the leader of an Ecuadorian gang called Los Choneros, which authorities have linked to extortion, murder and drug trafficking. They have been accused of controlling the country’s main prisons and are suspected to have played a role in the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio last year.
Fito himself was convicted of drug trafficking, murder and organised crime in 2011 and sentenced to 34 years in prison. He was scheduled on Sunday to be transferred to a maximum security facility but was instead discovered missing from his cell.
Why have they declared a state of emergency?
Following Fito’s escape, there was a wave of jail riots and escapes, which authorities blamed on criminal gangs. Riots broke out in at least six jails, with 150 or more guards and other staff taken hostage by prisoners.
Since the state of emergency was declared, at least 10 people have been killed in attacks linked to criminal gangs, seven police officers were kidnapped and nearly 40 inmates have broken out of a prison in Riobamba, a city in the country’s centre.
What does a state of emergency mean?
Under a state of emergency, the military can be mobilised and deployed into prisons, where much of the violence has sprung from, and onto the streets. A nightly curfew has also been imposed between 11pm and 5am in an attempt to curb violence. It is intended to be in place for 60 days.
The country is no stranger to being in a state of emergency. Previous president Guillermo Lasso often attempted to wrestle back control during times of violence by declaring a state of emergency, without much success. What is new is Fito labelling all the criminal groups “terrorists”. This means the army can now respond to them by using lethal force in the streets, a troubling twist.
What has the president said?
President Daniel Noboa, who was elected in November after running a campaign centred on tackling organised crime, said upon announcing the state of emergency: “We will not negotiate with terrorists and we will not rest until we have restored peace.”
Following the storming of Ecuadorian TV station TC Television by an armed gang on Tuesday, Noboa issued a further decree declaring war on armed gangs, stating that there was an “internal armed conflict” and calling upon the Ecuadorian military to “neutralise” the factions “within the bounds of international humanitarian law”.
What does this mean for freedoms in the country?
There is the obvious issue related to curfews, which are very direct curtailments of people’s freedom of movements. There are also the concerns that leaders can use extreme situations to seize rights. Beyond these concerns are those related to the factors that have given rise to the current situation: the state of emergency in Ecuador comes as a result of years of escalating violence and organised crime. In their 2023 Freedom in the World report, Freedom House described Ecuador as being in the midst of a “security crisis”, finding that the number of murders in the country in 2023 was more than double the previous year, with most incidents being linked to drug-related gang activity.
Media freedom is a particular issue in the state. RSF’s 2023 World Press Freedom Index found that journalists in Ecuador face hostility, physical danger and self-censorship as a result of the rising power of criminal gangs and drug cartels, and our Index Index categorised the state’s media as ‘significantly narrowed’. Previous murders of journalists Mike Cabrera, Gerardo Delgado and César Vivanco, as well as further death threats and targeted bomb campaigns, emphasise the threat facing media freedom in the country, as does the case of other countries – Mexico, for example, is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists as a result of the drugs trade.
The recent storming of TC Television adds to these concerns, with the channel’s head of news Alina Manrique telling The Associated Press: “All I know is that it’s time to leave this country and go very far away.”
09 Feb 15 | Ecuador, mobile, News and features
Ecuadorean cartoonist Xavier Bonilla, known as Bonil and an arts nominee in the 2015 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression awards, faces a hearing today at 9am (2pm GMT) under the country’s controversial communications law, which was introduced in 2013.
Bonilla and his newspaper, El Universo, will appear in front of Ecuador’s Superintendence of Information and Communication in response to the photographic montage pictured above. He was originally accused of racism – publicly by President Rafael Correa on his weekly TV broadcast – and then the charge was changed to “economic discrimination”.
The newspaper could face a $180K penalty since Ecuador’s communications law specifies a doubling of fines for each incident. Previously, El Universo was fined $93K for a cartoon that mocked a police raid.
The work mocks assemblyman and ex-footballer Agustín Delgado, nicknamed Tín, as he fumbles during a speech. It features a play on words – Pobre Tín, meaning Poor Tin, and Pobretón, meaning poor guy (with no money). The joke implies that people may feel sorry for Delgado for stuttering during his speech but no one feels sorry for his hefty government salary.
Bonilla’s critics say that because Delgado comes from a poor background and has no college degree, he should not be mocked.
“Freedom of expression here is permanently at risk”, Bonilla told Index during a recent interview. “Cartoons represent a satirical and humorous take on all things that happen in public life. It’s part of debate in societies that are democratic, modern and civilized. The public identify with a cartoons through their humour, and often humour represents a chance for a sort of revenge. When there is an excessive power, the normal citizen can see in a cartoon, in comedy, or in a TV sketch, that they have been defended. Because the power has been ‘censored’, morally censored, because a cartoon is an imaginary triumph against the powerful, the abusive, the arrogant, the corrupt.”
Read more on Ecuador’s media controls:
Ecuador’s crackdown on Twitter critics
Cartoonist sanctioned after under Ecuador’s communications law
Ecuador’s president wages social media counterattack aimed at ‘defamers’
This article was posted on 9 Feb 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
21 Nov 14 | Ecuador, Magazine, News and features, Politics and Society
Diana Amores’ Twitter account is currently suspended (@Diana_Amores). Is she a troll? Is she sending offensive pictures? No, she’s a translator based in Quito, Ecuador, with a tendency to post sarcastic comments about politics.
Diana is being targeted by Ares Rights, an internet reputation management company based in Barcelona. The trouble started earlier this year when she was being critical about the Ecuadorean government. Ares Rights filed complaints, claiming copyright violations and shut her down.
Why is a Spanish company concerned about what is being said about the Ecuadorean government? If you look at the individual complaints (and we have), Ares Rights has filed them on behalf of, variously, Ecuador’s governing party, Movimiento Alianza País; EcuadorTV (the state-run television station;) and even the president, Rafael Correa. The company has had various Twitter accounts suspended and documentaries pulled from YouTube. They have also targeted Buzzfeed and Chilling Effects, who wrote about Ares Rights specifically.
Is this an attempt by the state to silence critics? You can read the full, in-depth story here, from the last issue of Index on Censorship Magazine.
Diana’s latest Twitter suspension is on account of reports of “violent threats”. This is one of her alleged violent threats (translated from Spanish): “Today I received a notification of censorship from @Twitter and @Aresrights.” She included a screengrab of an email she received from Twitter saying AresRights had raised a copyright complaint. Again, it claimed to be filing this on behalf of Movimiento Alianza País (Correa’s party). This doesn’t prove they are contracted, but neither party have responded to Index’s call for clarification for our recent feature.
On Wednesday, there was an opposition march in Quito. Diana wanted to tweet from it. She couldn’t.
At the march, protesters held up a message to the government: “We are not afraid anymore”. President Correa has been accused of trying to intimidate critics. He has successfully pursued several libel lawsuits against the media since introducing his controversial communications law in 2013.
One of the early targets was a political cartoonist, Bonil. His newspaper, El Universo, was fined $92,000 over one of his cartoons. Now, 11 months on, Bonil is currently responding to a new complaint and fearing an even bigger fine.
You can read Bonil’s story – with a new cartoon by him highlighting the censorship of cartoonists – in the next issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
This article was published on 21 November 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
07 Mar 14 | Americas, Ecuador, News and features, Politics and Society
Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa (Image: Reynaldo C. Paganelli/Demotix)
President Rafael Correa’s new media law has “undercut press freedoms,” and “opens the door to censorship by giving the government or judges the power to decide if information is truthful”, according to a new report by the US State Department that ranked Ecuador as one of Latin America’s worst violators of press freedoms.
Unsurprisingly, the Correa administration hit back at the US. The Ecuadorian foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, released a statement which claimed the report was “one sided” and came from, “a country that has a poor track record in observing human rights.”
The diplomatic tussle marked another stage in the deteriorating relationship between Quito and Washington, after Correa offered Julian Assange asylum in Ecuador in August 2012 — the Wikileaks founder still remains at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. However, the report has also highlighted the explicit crackdown on the media by Correa.
At the end of January, Correa’s government lashed out at El Universo newspaper for printing a cartoon which satirised the Boxing Day raid of opposition activist Fernando Villavicencio. Using Supercom, the media regulator established by last year’s communications law, El Universo was ordered to print a correction, and the paper was fined 2% of its average monthly sales. This recent incident marks a dangerous precedent for print media in Ecuador.
The communications law is a sweeping reform to the media landscape in Ecuador that in principle was designed to prohibit censorship, redistribute broadcast fairly and protect the rights of journalists. The reality is that the law is filled with loopholes which are open to manipulation, and allow for state interference — the creation of Supercom is a clear example of such problems.
Martin Pallares, a journalist at El Comercio, said the law, and its “subjective norms,” has led to, “tremendous self-censorship and a terrible fear among journalist.” According to Pallares, newspapers are constantly overshadowed by a fear that they will be forced out of business by a heavy fine for publishing an anti-government article. He also said the situation is more worrying because, “Correa controls the judicial system and if he wants he may order that any journalist can be prosecuted for libel.”
Reporters Without Borders has said some aspects of the communications law are positive, praising the “fairer distribution” of broadcast frequencies. But Camille Soulier, the head of Reporters Without Borders Americas desk warned the cartoon incident was the most “obvious case” of the dangers of the law which, “used in this way could foreshadow an increase in the disrespect for freedom of information.”
El Universo’s cartoon fine was not the only example of Correa intimidating partisan journalists. In September 2012, the magazine Vistazo was fined $80,000 for publishing an article which supposedly advocated a “no” vote against Correa. Then in February 2013, Ecuador’s highest held court upheld a libel conviction against El Universo that imposed a $40m fine and sentenced the three directors of the paper, and its leading columnist Emilio Palacio, to three years in jail each, for an article which accused Correa of human rights abuses. The men were later pardoned by the president, but the case still demonstrates the president’s ongoing bullying of the press.
The El Universo lawsuit had serious implications for Ecuador’s media according to the Committee to Protect Journalists’ (CPJ) Andes correspondent, John Otis. Otis said that after this lawsuit, Ecuadorian publishers and newspapers became more worried about publishing material, even if they knew that all their information is correct. “The El Universo case scares people”, Otis said, because of its potential financial implications.
Incidents such as this libel case have given rise to intense animosity from Ecuador’s media against the president. El Comercio’s Pallares has accused Correa of Orwellian control of the press. He said: “Correa does not tolerate diversity of opinions because of his deep seated religious background, and other traumas which makes him think he owns the truth. ‘You are a liar and we are the truth,’ he said to a journalist who asked him an uncomfortable question at a presentation at Columbia University some years ago.” While this depiction of Correa is evidently extreme, it is true that the president, now in his third term, set off to battle against the media from the outset.
Antoni Kapcia, a professor of Latin American History, at the University of Nottingham, views the relationship between Correa and Ecuador’s press in a more complex way however. Kapcia said that the press have been, “vehemently anti-Correa from the start,” and “they have not exactly been pursuing the lily-white truth in all these battles.” Kapcia believes that faults have been convicted on both sides of the war. “Correa is as much hitting out in retaliation as repressing the press, and in reality, he doesn’t control enough to really repress, even if he wanted to, so it’s more a case of kicking the press’s shins than really chaining it up.”
With the populist Correa, who has been in power since 2006, recently losing important local elections, the political future of Ecuador remains uncertain. One thing remains clear however, Correa’s crackdowns on Ecuador’s press are a serious threat to the democratic hopes of this Latin American nation.
This article was posted on March 7, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
