Obama Gives Ecuador’s Caudillo A Pass While Everyone Was Distracted By Debt Crisis
Aug 8, 2011 1 Comment ›› Pat Dollard
After last month’s debt-ceiling debacle, a critical mass of President Obama’s harshest critics have gone from calling him socialism’s evil genius to tagging him as merely a clueless community organizer who is in over his head.
Yet while the haggling over spending exposed many of the president’s weaknesses, it seems a mistake to underestimate his collectivist instincts. It may be true that if he cannot accomplish what he wants by decree, he loses interest fast. But it also remains evident that his worldview is largely aligned with the eternal struggle for an all-powerful state.
Observe U.S. foreign policy in Latin America over the last two and a half years: In particular, consider how Honduras took a beating from the Obama administration over its decision to remove a law-breaking leftist president in 2009, while Ecuador is getting little pushback from Washington as it steps ever closer to dictatorship.
This contradiction became pronounced last month when Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa, an ally of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, used his control of the judiciary to win a lawsuit against a columnist and three directors of the Ecuadoran daily El Universo. They will have to pay him a total of $42 million, and each has been sentenced to three years in jail.
Mr. Obama’s State Department is treating the Ecuadoran incident gingerly. It issued a brief statement on the importance of a free press and said that it “join[s] the Inter American Press Association, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and others in expressing concern over the sentence in the El Universo case.” There will be an appeal, and State said it “will closely follow the process.” Yet with democracy in peril, that is downright timid—not to mention a little late—compared to the fury unleashed against Honduras two years ago.
In 2009, Honduras fought to save its democracy by removing then-President Manuel Zelaya, who had used street violence to try to extend his tenure in violation of his country’s constitution. The Obama administration responded by pulling the travel visas of Honduras’s Supreme Court judges, human rights ombudsman and members of Congress. It suspended most U.S. aid and supported the suspension of Honduras from the Organization of American States (OAS), which resulted in the cutoff of aid from international financial institutions.
As with Mr. Zelaya, the administration has given Mr. Correa a wide berth, despite his antidemocratic practices. Since he took office in 2007, he has used both state power and mob violence to enforce his will whenever other branches of government do not cooperate with his agenda. And he has used his primitive definition of democracy—majority rules—to destroy his opponents, stifle dissent and consolidate power.
In a May referendum that Mr. Correa organized, he asked voters, among other things, to give him control of the judiciary and the power to bar owners of media companies from engaging in other businesses. The narrow approval he won portends the end of pluralism in his country.
The president of a democracy might at least pretend to respect the independence of the judicial branch, but Mr. Correa has never bothered with appearances. “Yes, we want to put our hands in the court,” he said in January as he prepared the country for the referendum.
His determination to silence his media critics has been more overt, as the El Universo case demonstrates. The column in question called the president “a dictator” and challenged his claim that he was a victim of “a coup” in September 2009 when he went to a police barracks during a strike. Yet what most agitated Mr. Correa—and what he sued for—was the suggestion that he could be held accountable for giving the order to fire on the hospital across the street from the barracks, as part of his “coup” charade.
In a democracy, opinions are part of free speech and the president’s attorney never showed that the columnist had lied. Moreover, the government has classified most documents related to the incident, and a report from the military command that says that Mr. Correa gave the order to fire was not permitted as evidence in the case.
With his court victory, Mr. Correa has established that those who cross him should expect to be financially ruined. Radio and television stations also have been reminded that the government controls the renewal of their licenses.
When I called the OAS press office for a statement on the travesty in Ecuador, the person who came to the phone would only say that the OAS has “no comment.” It is hardly surprising. The credibility of that institution has been destroyed because, in the absence of U.S. leadership, Mr. Chávez and company have taken it over. OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza, a washed-up Chilean Socialist, bends to every whim of his chavista task masters.
This brings us back to the question of where Mr. Obama’s sympathies lie. A good clue can be found by comparing the aggression launched against Tegucigalpa with the timidity of the policy toward Quito.
