The
successor of Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Lenin Moreno, is very close
to mark a big victory
against the Right Wing opponent, Guillermo Lasso, and that's good
news for Julian Assange and the Whistleblowers community:
With
just over 88 percent of votes counted in Ecuador's election as of
Monday, left-wing front-runner Lenin Moreno led the presidential race
with 39.11 percent of the vote, bringing him closer to the 40 percent
threshold that he needs to avoid a second round. Moreno's closest
contender, conservative former banker Guillermo Lasso of the
right-wing CREO party, trailed more than 10 percent behind the
presidential favorite with 28.31 percent.
Guillermo
Lasso, faithful to the neoliberal establishment, stated recently that he will stop providing asylum to
Assange:
In an
interview with the Guardian, Guillermo Lasso, of the rightwing
Creo-Suma alliance, said it was time for the WikiLeaks founder to
move on because his asylum was expensive and no longer justified.
“The Ecuadorian people have been paying a cost that we should not
have to bear,” he said during an interview in Quito. “We will
cordially ask Señor Assange to leave within 30 days of assuming a
mandate.”
Telesur
gives a short background of the banker Lasso:
Before
his first unsuccessful run for the presidency in 2013 — where he
came in a distant second to Rafael Correa — Lasso had been one of
the most powerful figures in Ecuador's finance sector as president
and majority shareholder of the Bank of Guayaquil for 18 years.
[...]
Despite,
or perhaps because of, Lasso's controversial short reign as governor
— where he attacked civil servants and used state police to
violently repress union demonstrations — Mahuad appointed Lasso as
Ecuador's minister of finance and energy in 1999.
In
that role, Lasso — in a departure from his current promises to
eliminate corporate and inheritance taxes — oversaw a significant
increase in the sales tax on basic goods which primarily affected
poor and middle-class Ecuadoreans.
[...]
Despite
overseeing Ecuador's economy in the lead-up to the country's worst
ever economic crisis, Lasso himself was never charged in connection
to the banking scandal which crippled the country's economy and led
to the forced migration of almost three million Ecuadoreans.
In
fact, President Mahuad's decision to freeze all bank accounts in the
country for a year eventually meant millions of dollars in profits
for Lasso and his bank, as people were forced to withdraw their
savings at half their value.
From
the results so far, Lasso will not be able to challenge Moreno's
victory, which means that Julian Assange can feel safe in the
Ecuadorian embassy in London for now.
Assange
has been trapped in Ecuador's London embassy since 2012 when the
left-wing government of Rafael Correa granted him asylum over
concerns about his political persecution and potential torture if he
were deported to the US. Recall that the United Nations ruled that
the UK and Swedish governments were guilty of arbitrarily detaining
Assange for continually refusing to guarantee they would not deport
him to the US.
Meanwhile,
Assange has recently opened a twitter account to
repel rumors of his supposed death.
Despite
Moreno's victory, the situation for Assange becomes increasingly
problematic. Pressure from the US empire continues and Trump's stance
shows that he will continue the fierce hunt against him and against
the Whistleblowers on behalf of the neoliberal/neocon establishment.
Moreno
has made already some statements,
apparently to calm the unpredictable Donald Trump:
“We
granted Assange political asylum because his life was in danger. We
don’t have the death penalty in Ecuador. We saw that a citizen of
the world – it doesn’t matter who he is – was in danger. That’s
why we granted him asylum and it was by and large preserved. I say
‘by and large,’ because it all could have been done more
competently by the country on which territory he is now. One thing
that is clear is that Assange will have to reduce meddling in the
policies of the nations we have friendly relations with,” Moreno
said in an exclusive interview with RT Spanish. Expanding on his
comment, Moreno said that he specifically meant “the way he
[Assange] meddled with the election campaign in the United States.”
A
global movement is absolutely necessary for the protection and
liberation of Julian Assange and the other Whistleblowers.
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