There was always a surreal edge to Julian Assange’s long sojourn in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London — a Monty Python-esque oddity to having a figure so strange, so central to so many of the rich world’s most urgent debates, camping out in an embassy belonging to a distant developing country he had never actually set foot in. In the person of Assange, the domestic politics of a distant corner of South America collided with big-time geopolitics and various U.S. neuroses in a way neither side seemed quite prepared to handle.
After he skipped on his bail back in 2012, Assange seemed to be looking for a few different things. He wanted to seek refuge on a reliable anti-U.S. diplomatic outpost, the kind of place ruled by people who wouldn’t merely accept a move to incense the United States but would actively relish it. But he didn’t want to sully his brand by siding with a straight-up dictatorship, either — the Russias, Irans and Cubas of this world were too off-brand for the founder of WikiLeaks.
Ecuador, for its part, was in the Goldilocks zone. Under the leadership of President Rafael Correa, it had staked out a niche on the farthest fringes of rhetorical anti-Americanism alongside countries such as Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Correa couldn’t exactly be called a dictator: For all his obvious disdain for democratic decision-making and accountability, his country preserved spaces for liberty that kept its brand viable worldwide.
What Assange doesn’t seem to have calculated is that these two elements that attracted him to Ecuador were at cross-purposes with each other. If Ecuador remained a democracy, then Correa’s grip on power couldn’t be guaranteed. And if Correa’s tenure wasn’t secure, neither was Assange’s extended stay at the London embassy.
Assange probably breathed a sigh of relief on April 2, 2017, when Correa’s handpicked successor, Lenín Moreno, was narrowly elected to succeed him in the presidency. Moreno had been Correa’s first vice president and was a reliable ally — or so everyone thought. What no one in Quito (or London) could foresee was that Moreno would decisively turn on his mentor, taking Ecuador in a much more moderate, if still left-wing, direction and dismantling the creeping authoritarian infrastructure Correa had spent a decade building.
Under Moreno, Ecuador decisively broke with the hard-left block of countries led by Cuba and Venezuela. He left behind the stridently anti-American path of his mentor and launched a much more cooperative relationship with Washington. The moves incensed Correa — and Assange.
It appears Assange badly misjudged the mood in Quito in the months leading up to his arrest. The Ecuadorans claim that Assange routinely flouted the agreement the country had reached with him as a condition of his asylum — in particular, refraining from meddling in other countries’ politics.
Explaining his decision to revoke the asylum in a videotaped speech, Moreno accused Assange of mistreating embassy guards, saying Assange “installed electronic and distortion equipment”, “blocked the security cameras” and “accessed the security files of our embassy without permission”. He also said WikiLeaks threatened the Ecuadoran government, seemingly referencing leaked documents linking Moreno to a corruption scandal. It was a badly misjudged move that seems to have tipped Moreno over the edge.
In the hours after Assange’s arrest, the usual festival of ironies played out across Latin America’s airwaves. As president, Correa systematically hounded journalists and approved a restrictive law that effectively shut down corruption investigations. But faced with Assange’s arrest, he has transformed into a champion of free speech, slamming his successor for silencing a fearless whistleblower.
Farther south, Bolivia’s stridently anti-American leader, Evo Morales, joined the chorus of the faux-outraged, decrying Assange’s arrest on freedom of speech grounds. As former Bolivian president and Morales critic Jorge Quiroga told me, the president “demands, for an Australian in the U.K., the respect for press freedoms that he never respected in his own country”.
The reality is that Latin America’s far-left regimes support press freedom only when doing so gives them a chance to give the United States a bloody nose. It is this dogged determination to prize hurting the United States above all other values that they have in common with Assange. The only difference is that Assange has been vastly more effective at it than them.
After all, he got Donald Trump elected.
Francisco Toro is Chief Content Officer of the Group of 50 and a contributing columnist for Post Opinions.