Bonil is the pen name for Xavier Bonilla, an Ecuador-based editorial cartoonist who draws for several national newspapers, particularly El Universo. For 30 years he has critiqued, lampooned and ruffled the feathers of Ecuador’s political leaders, earning a reputation as one of the wittiest and most fearless cartoonists in South America.
More recently, Bonil has gained a new epithet – “the pursued cartoonist” is how Spanish newspaper El Pais recently styled him. Bonil’s work had regularly attracted the ire of incumbent president Rafael Correa. But in 2014 anger escalated to retribution, the president publicly denounced Bonil and threatened him with legal action on two separate occasions – the first was successful against Bonil, and the second is ongoing.
President Correa has been in constant battle with the domestic press since first being elected in 2007. He has reprimanded journalists critical of the state through a combination of crippling fines and smear campaigns on his weekly TV show. In response to a 2012 article in El Universo calling him a dictator, he charged the paper with criminal libel – leading editors were sentenced to three years each in prison, and the paper was fined $42 million.
On that occasion, international pressure led Correa to pardon the newspaper at the 11th hour. But in June 2013 he introduced a new communications law which, under the guise of promoting freedom of expression, codified the repression of political journalism. It ordained that “information of public interest received through the media should be verified, balanced, contextualized and opportune” – meaning the government had the ultimate say on whether a journalist’s work was appropriate.
Bonil was the first individual to be targeted by the legislation. In December 2013, police raided the apartment of Fernando Villavicencio, a journalist and adviser to an opposition party, and took his computers and files. Villavicencio had claimed to own documents revealing government corruption. Correa alleged that Villavicencio had illegally hacked into government emails.
Bonil’s depiction of the incident (see below), published in El Universo the following day, took Villavicencio’s side. Correa publicly denounced the cartoon, calling Bonil “sick”, “cowardly” and “an ink assassin”. He called for an investigation which led to Bonil and El Universo being dragged before a media regulatory agency, which fined El Universo $92,000 and ordered Bonil to draw a “retraction” cartoon (also below) within three days. In this version, dripping with sarcasm, comically polite officers give a bunch of flowers to Villavicencio, who in turn begs the police to take away his belongings.
Bonil attracted further government attention when, in August 2014, he drew a cartoon ridiculing star footballer-turned-statesman Agustín “El Tin” Delgado. A viral video had showed El Tin struggling to read through a speech in parliament. Bonil’s cartoon suggested that ridicule of El Tin was justified, given his sizeable government salary. President Correa has since repeatedly denounced Bonil as racist and called the cartoon a “hate crime” – a charge which can carry a three-year prison sentence. Bonil has responded that the cartoon had no racial element.
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.
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.
While president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s government took a hit during midterm elections, Argentina’s supreme court ruled her restrictions on the country’s media were constitutional. (Photo: Claudio Santisteban / Demotix)
The Argentinian supreme court recently ruled to uphold the country’s controversial media law. The decision represents a big victory for President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who argued that the law helps break up the power concentrated in the hands of Argentina’s biggest media conglomerate Grupo Clarín. Opponents, however, says it stifles freedom of expression and press as it would force media companies to sell off some of their outlets. Concerns have also been raised about the law being a way of punishing Clarín, which fell out with the government after negative coverage during tax protests in 2008.
This is only the latest chapter in the ongoing story of the media business in some Latin American countries, with left wing governments and private companies locked in a decade-long fight for control of what will be shown on TV, heard on the radio, printed in newspapers, and posted on websites. New communications laws, persecution of journalists and closure of television networks, however, shows who is really in charge.
Governments like Venezuela and Argentina are waging war against big media companies, while more moderate ones, like Brazil, are using milder means to try and balance the power of communication in their countries. But far from being presented as a straightforward issue of freedom of expression, most of these cases have two opposing and radical interpretations.
On one side, there is the pro-government camp. They believe the governments are democratising the media, which has traditionally been in the hands of the few. In Brazil, for example, eight families control almost 80% of all traditional media companies. The aforementioned Grupo Clarín owns national and regional newspapers, radios, TV channels and more.
Those opposing these measures, however, say they amount to censorship. Again, a good example comes from Argentina: there are some rumours that Kirchner’s administration is trying to suffocate Grupo Clarín by not allowing big chain stores to advertise in their papers. There is also the infamous case of the the closure of Venezuela TV channel RCTVI in 2010.
Both sides talk of freedom of expression, arguing they want to show what is better for the public. But the public – those with the most to benefit from a good and transparent media – are not being allowed to decide for themselves. This is not happening just in Argentina and Venezuela, but across the continent – in Ecuador, Nicaragua and Bolivia, and, albeit in a much gentler way, in Brazil.
Professor Mirta Varela, specialist in history of the media at the University of Buenos Aires, is among those who believe governments are not repressing the big companies or trying to dominate the industry. “The measures taken have shown the political and economic power of the main companies, the spurious origin of their economic growth and their relationship with the dictatorship”, she explains, referencing Grupo Clarín and the military regimes that held power in almost all the Latin American countries from 1960 to 1980. But she also sees some problems with this polarisation: “There is a little room to set a new agenda; to make independent criticism, not overtly for or against the government.”
Cecilia Sanz works for Argentinian TV show “Bajada de línea”, which roughly translates to “Under the Line”. The show is hosted by Uruguayan Victor Hugo Morales, a well-known journalist connected to what Sanz calls “the progressive governments” in Latin America. Here she groups together a number of different left-leaning governments from across the continent – from moderates Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, to the more radical Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador.
The show comments on the state of the media in Latin America, mainly arguing against the big private companies. “Our main goal is to put in context and show how the media owners have the intention, above all else, to accomplish their economic objectives,” she says. “The are using ‘freedom of expression’ as an excuse for this”. She mentions the case of powerful Mexican TV Azteca, which according to her, supports all the candidates from the hegemonic party PRI, and Chilean paper “El Mercurio”, which used to attack Chilean ex-president Salvador Allende in the 1970s – again putting very different cases in the same group.
The more radical of these “progressive governments” accuse the media industry of trying to destabilise the authorities or to encourage coups d’état. Venezuela’s putsch in 2002 is always mentioned. In this case factions of the media was directly fighting against Hugo Chávez – so Chávez took them off the air.
“This is an insult to the audience because in all of cases it is about the most popular media channels”, counters Claudio Paolillo, president of the freedom of press and expression commission of SIP, Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa (the Inter-American Press Society). “No one has put a gun to the audience’s head to force them to choose what to read, listen or watch, and on what channel.”
Paolillo says the government engages in “Goebbels’ style” propaganda, sustained by public resources, to oppress independent or critic media and journalists. He adds that, ironically, these radical “progressive governments” act like the conservative military regimes of the past. “It is an ideological posture. They want to nationalise communications media as if it was a regular business that offers services or products.”
Paolillo says SIP is against Latin Americas state-controlled monopolies or oligopolies, but reaffirms it is the audience that has the real power to decide what to watch, and where. If they want to watch the same news program, the government shall not interfere. “Unfortunately in Argentina as in Venezuela (and we must add here Ecuador, Nicaragua and Bolivia), governments have created their own media companies, expropriated and bought private ones – in some cases even working through a figurehead”, he complains.
Brazilian political scientist Mauricio Santoro brings up another common problem in the region – organised crime targeting reporters in Mexico and Colombia. But he says this is not a new situation. In his opinion, what is new, is “progressive governments” using the power of the state to control its opponents.
“The alternative proposed by these leftist governments is not based on the construction of an alternative model that privileges pluralism and gives a voice to social and community movements. It is about breaking business groups and giving power to a state press that acts like a government representative and not a public one.”
Worried about the poor quality of the media across Latin America, Santoro suggests the continent needs a more dynamic media, more capable of listening and understanding the true necessities of the people of a region going through “profound change”.
“Looking at the local scene”, he asks, “are we able to find any country where the traditional media meets this expectation?”
