My Take | How five democracies conspired to entrap Julian Assange

Throughout the second half of 2019, riots and protests gripped the city, leading to increasingly intense and violent confrontations with police. Many businesses throughout the city were hurt. Myriad social, political and economic problems long simmering under the surface burst forth, all causing intense dissatisfaction with the government, even hatred against it. At times, the city was paralysed.

Oh, you thought I was talking about Hong Kong? Actually no; the following would have given the game away. At least six protesters were killed and hundreds injured, according to official estimates. A state of emergency, or what the government of Ecuador called “a state of exception”, was eventually declared in the capital, Quito, allowing the military to exercise total control and discretion. Lenin Moreno, who was president at the time, fled the city.

Back in Hong Kong, no rioter or protester was killed. No state of emergency or martial law was ever declared. No People’s Liberation Army personnel were ever involved, except in cleaning up debris after a particularly nasty typhoon.

But Western media and governments, especially US media and Washington, went into a hysterical feeding frenzy over Hong Kong that continues to this day. Meanwhile, Washington was practically silent about the troubles in Ecuador, which became friendly with the United States once again after a period of hostility under Moreno’s predecessor and former mentor, the leftist Rafael Vicente Correa, most famous to many foreigners for providing sanctuary to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy in London and granting him citizenship.

In the case of Assange and how Washington managed to trap the world’s greatest citizen-journalist by bending not one, not two but four supposedly democratic governments to its will, the domestic politics of Ecuador in the past decade is perhaps the least understood but also the most relevant.