[Peace-discuss] Ecuadorian police repress mass march demanding Julian Assange's freedom

Fri Apr 19 12:10:29 UTC 2019

Ecuadorian police repress mass march demanding Julian Assanges freedom

By Bill Van Auken 
18 April 2019 

Thousands of Ecuadorian workers and youth marched through Quitos historic
colonial center Wednesday demanding the downfall of the countrys President
Lenin Moreno and freedom for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The demonstration, one of the largest since Moreno took office in 2017, was
met with brutal repression. The security forces unleashed mounted police,
attack dogs and tear gas against the marchers as they came within two blocks
of the Plaza de la Independencia, the site of the Carondelet presidential
palace, which was ringed by a heavy cordon of police and armed troops.

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Several people were wounded in the police attack, including two news
photographers, and at least six were arrested.

Protesters carried signs demanding Free Assange, and many wore Assange
masks. Others carried placards with photos and drawings depicting Assanges
cat, mocking the Moreno government, whose ambassador in London had absurdly
accused the pet of spying on the embassy staff.

The crowds chanted, Moreno, hypocrite and traitor, the people reject you!

The trigger for the demonstration, called under the slogan not one less
right [#niunderechomenos] was the Moreno governments order to throw open
the doors to the London embassy, where Assange had been granted asylum since
2012, to a police snatch squad which dragged him away to a British jail
cell. As a result, he now faces the threat of rendition to the US to face
trial for daring to publish documents exposing the war crimes and global
conspiracies of the US government.

Organizers of the march, which included prominently the party Revolución
Ciudadana which supports the former president and Moreno opponent Rafael
Correa, said that as many as 20,000 took part in the protest.

Inscribed on the banners carried on the march were slogans denouncing Moreno
as a traitor and world disgrace for his action against Assange.

One prominent banner read, Assange is an Ecuadorian, a reference to the
citizenship that was granted to the Australian-born journalist in 2017 and
summarily and extra-legally stripped from him by the Moreno government in
conjunction with handing him over to the British police. Another warned
Moreno that Assange will be your nightmare.

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Assange was the trigger for the protest, said Edwin Jarrin, the former
spokesman for Ecuadors Council of Citizen Participation and Social Control,
who participated in the march, which he said was also an expression of
collective indignation over the attack on basic rights as well as mass
layoffs and neo-liberal policies of the Moreno government.

As part of a deal signed with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for $4.5
billion in credits, the Moreno government is implementing a series of
structural adjustment measures that have included the gutting of labor
laws, the layoffs of over 10,000 public employees, attacks on pensions and
sharp cuts to government services.

Moreno served as vice-president under Correa and was his hand-picked
successor. While Correa cast himself as part of the Pink Tide and
Bolivarian revolution that saw bourgeois populist nationalist governments
take office in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and elsewhere, he himself had
initiated moves toward rapprochement with Washington as the commodity boom
ended. He also took the first measures to silence Assange, cutting off his
internet access after the WikiLeaks release of emails exposing the
Democratic Party leaderships attempts to rig the primaries against Bernie
Sanders and the closed-door speeches given by Hillary Clinton pledging to
defend the interests of Wall Street.

Once in office, Moreno violently accelerated this turn to the right, with
his betrayal of Assange to the British and US authorities culminating an
ever closer embrace of Washingtons foreign policy and its military and
intelligence apparatus, which has been invited back into Ecuador.

 <https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/mediaCategory/free-manning/>
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This right-wing turn, combined with escalating attacks on the rights and
social conditions of the Ecuadorian working class, has inevitably given rise
to increasingly repressive measures by the Moreno government that are bound
up with the case of Julian Assange.

In advance of Tuesdays march, the Moreno government had sought the arrest
of two of its principal organizers, the countrys former foreign minister,
Ricardo Patiño, and Virgilio Hernández, a former legislator, on trumped-up
charges.

It has also jailed Ola Bini, a Swedish citizen residing in Ecuador, who was
arrested on charges of hacking public and private phones and social media
accounts on the sole evidence that he was a friend of Assange and had
visited him on a number of occasions at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Bini, who has resided in Ecuador for five years, was working for a
Quito-based center that specialized in internet security, encryption and the
expansion of free software.

His parents, who arrived in Quito on Monday, issued a public statement
insisting that their son is innocent of what they have accused him; our son
has not attacked the safety of any system, private or public. They told the
media that friends of their son all over the world were concerned over his
arrest in Ecuador, and that they had come to bring him home.

The frame-up of Bini is bound up with the Moreno governments retaliation
against the exposure of the presidents and his familys involvement in a
massive corruption scandal involving the funneling of millions of dollars in
bribe money from a Chinese construction contractor into an offshore shell
company named after the presidents three daughters.

The publication of the so-called INA papers exposing this corruption was
widely reported and prompted the initiation of a congressional investigation
in Ecuador before WikiLeaks called attention to the scandal on its Twitter
account last month. The Moreno government seized on the tweet to accuse
WikiLeaks and Julian Assange personallydespite the intense surveillance and
conditions approaching that of solitary confinement in the London embassyof
having hacked the phones and social media accounts of Moreno and his family
to secure the evidence of corruption.

Moreno cast himself as a victim of an invasion of privacy, expressing his
ire over the publication of personal photographs, including one of himself
eating a lobster dinner in bed at the same time that his government was
ordering massive layoffs and austerity measures.

During his trip to Washington this week in the immediate aftermath of the
handing over of Assange to the British police, Moreno participated in a
public forum at the Inter-American Dialogue, a big-business-controlled
Washington think tank, where he repeated his claim that he was justified in
inviting the British police to drag Assange out of Ecuadors London embassy
because he had turned the diplomatic facility into a center of espionage.

This ridiculous claim, under conditions in which Assange was himself
subjected to 24/7 surveillance, dovetails with the position of the Trump
administration, put forward by former CIA director and current Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo, that WikiLeaks constitutes a non-state hostile
intelligence service and is designed to facilitate his prosecution in the
US under the Espionage Act.

While Moreno is claiming overwhelming popular support for his betrayal of
Assange, the mass protest in Quito expressed broad sentiments of support for
the courageous journalist and the anger of millions of Ecuadorians that
their government has become a pawn of US imperialist interests, prepared to
carry out the filthiest betrayal in return for potential debt relief and
trade deals.

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The thousands who marched in Quito on Tuesday speak for millions of workers
and youth all over the world who feel disgust and outrage over the jailing
of Julian Assange in the UK and the threat that the Trump administration
will illegally seize the WikiLeaks founder and subject him to detention,
possible torture and even death for exposing the war crimes and diplomatic
conspiracies of the US government.

The resurgence of the struggles of the working class on a worldwide scale is
the foundation for the mobilization of mass support for the defense of
democratic rights and the freeing of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and
others jailed for exposing and opposing the crimes of imperialism.

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