Rule by Noise

This is an excerpt. The original article appears in the Fall 2011 issue.

Rafael Correa was elected President of the Republic of Ecuador in 2007, when he ran with the Alianza PAIS political movement. Alianza PAIS endorsed a political alliance with the Ecuadorian Socialist Party and the Communist Party of Ecuador, and is usually denominated as the Revolución Ciudadana (“The People’s Revolution”). The movement seeks to steer the Ecuadorian government toward “socialism of the 21st century”—a concept which acquired global currency when it was adopted, in 2005, by the Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chávez.

In the past four years, Correa’s administration has dismantled Ecuador’s Congress and re-written the country’s constitution, among other radical changes to the government’s structure. But what has undergone the most profound and long-lasting transformation is the Ecuadorian media.  Shortly after his ascension to the presidency, President Correa verbally opened fire against various media organization, labeling them as “savage beasts,” “informative mafias,” and “charlatans,” thereby declaring a fiery war against the press.

In 2008, government officials, citing technical irregularities with the station’s license, shut down Radio Sucre, a frequent critic of Correa’s administration. The list of media stations expropriated by the government since then has only increased: El Telegrafo (a newspaper), Cable Noticias, Cable Deportes, La Otra Group (a magazine publisher), Radio Universal, GamaTV, and TC Televisión. (The last two stations together account for about forty percent of the country’s nightly news audience.) Around the same time of Radio Sucre’s dismantling, officials of Correa’s announced that the expropriated stations and the assets seized from them would be sold. (As of 2011, this promise remains unfulfilled.) Meanwhile, Correa’s government created several new media organizations like EcuadorTV, Radio Pública, El Ciudadano, and Agencia Ecuatoriana de Noticias ANDES.

Three years later, in August of this year, Correa won a $40 million libel lawsuit he had filed against journalist Emilio Palacios, and STOP, the directors of El Universo, which is one of the largest newspapers in Ecuador. The lawsuit cited an article published in El Universo in which Palacios, the article’s author, remarked that President Correa could be prosecuted by a future administration for allegedly ordering Ecuador’s military to open fire on police officers during a police rebellion on September 30th of last year.

This past summer, I interned with TeleAmazonas, which is one of two major television stations that remain unaffiliated with the government. During my time working at the station, which Correa’s government has repeatedly sanctioned and at one point illegally forced off the air for three days, working journalists employed the term “self-censorship” to describe their worry of falling prey to the fear aroused in them by the current regime, which targets individual journalists and media outlets by imposing harsh monetary penalties. Thus, in the service of reporting the truth, Ecuadorian journalists make something of a brave statement—about their country, to be sure, but also themselves.

The anxiety of practicing journalists and private media has only worsened since May 7th of this year, when a national referendum—a plebiscite, or ballot—proposed by President Correa passed by a hair’s breadth. The referendum in question asked voters whether, in an effort “to avoid the excesses of media,” there should be established a “Regulatory Council that may regulate the broadcast content.” Having won the referendum, Correa’s government has legitimized government censorship and control over the information and opinions that can reach the public, thus defusing the country’s few weapons against government corruption.

Alfonso Perez, the director of one of the most influential Ecuadorian online newspapers, Ecuador en Vivo, told me that the state-owned media outlets have never reported on cases of corruption in Correa’s government. According to Perez, “All allegations of corruption that have occurred in this government come only from the private media.” And Correa has not lacked an expensive taste for corruption: a recent scandal involved illegal contracts, valued at 300 million dollars, between the government and the President’s brother, Fabricio Correa.

“President Correa needs to discredit the press; he needs to take away its credibility,” Perez told me, “because the press is the only way for citizens to have free and independent information that is not originated from the government.”

Though Correa has never shown the press much respect, he did give much credit to WikiLeaks, the document-leaking website, to the point of expelling Ecuador’s U.S. Ambassador, in April 2011, after WikiLeaks released a series of confidential diplomatic cables of the U.S. State Department, which reevealed that the U.S. Ambassador at the time, Heather M. Hodges, did not endorse Correa’s decision to retain a former police commander, Jaime Aquilino Hurtado. (In one of the cables, Hodges had speculated that Correa knew Hurtado was corrupt but kept him around as commander of the national police to ensure he remained “easily manipulated”.)

Purchase the print issue to read the rest of this article.