By John Polga-Hecimovich*

President Lenín Moreno / Flickr / Archivo Medios Públicos EP / Creative Commons

Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno’s announcement last week that he had withdrawn diplomatic immunity for Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange was long in coming and consistent with his efforts to reverse the excesses of his predecessor, ex-President Rafael Correa. In a three-minute-fifteen-second speech via Twitter, Moreno listed the reasons for his decision: Assange’s disrespectful and aggressive conduct, Wikileaks statements against Ecuador and, above all, Assange’s transgression of “international conventions.” Predictably, Correa, who originally offered the asylum protection, accused Moreno of being “the greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history” who had committed a crime “that humanity will never forget.” Wikileaks accused Moreno of trading Assange to the United States for debt relief. Rhetoric and accusations aside, Assange had long been on shaky ground with the Moreno administration, and recent leaks of the president’s personal information made the decision seemingly inevitable.

• Correa offered Assange asylum in 2012 to thumb his nose at the United States and contest claims that he did not protect freedom of the press. After Wikileaks leaked hundreds of Democratic Party campaign emails in 2016, he restricted Assange’s internet access at the embassy in London but, for ideological consistency, continued to support his infamous houseguest. Moreno possessed no such ties when he took office in May 2017 and called Assange “an inherited problem.” Assange’s asylum impeded Moreno’s ability to seek greater security and commercial cooperation with the United States.
• The Wikileaks founder did not seem to understand the significance of this change. Not only was he messy, demanding, and abusive toward embassy staff; he reportedly violated his asylum conditions and, according to Moreno, tried to use the embassy as a “center for spying” – prompting Ecuador last October to impose a protocol regulating his visits, communications, and other matters. The tipping point for the Ecuadorian government was in February, when an anonymous source sent a trove of emails, phone communications, and expense receipts to Ecuadorian journalists, supposedly linking the president and his family to a series of corrupt and criminal dealings, including money laundering and offshore accounts, leading to a corruption investigation by Ecuador’s attorney general. A website also published leaked personal material unrelated to corruption, including photos of Moreno and his family lifted directly from his phone.

Moreno’s decision is unlikely to significantly affect his political capital. Although polls show his approval rating continues to decline as he pursues fiscal austerity policies, public opinion on this issue is likely to split along existing pro-Correa and anti-Correa lines. Further, given that personal information was already leaked, Moreno does not seem to fear potential reprisals from Wikileaks or others for his action. Nor does he appear to harbor additional political ambitions: he has all but ruled out running in the 2021 elections, and his once-dominant Alianza País (AP) party performed poorly in the March 24 regional elections, managing to win a paltry two of 23 governorships and only 28 of the 221 mayoralties. If anything, Moreno should be more worried about the attorney general’s investigation than the fallout from booting Assange.

Little by little in his two years in office Moreno has neutralized Correa’s political power and reversed his predecessor’s policies – often provoking the ex-president (see previous posts here and here). In the last six weeks alone, Moreno announced he would launch an international anti-corruption commission; hosted and expressed his support for Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, saying that Venezuela and Ecuador “are both on the way out of the abyss in which we were placed: this poorly named 21st century socialism”; and signed a $4.2 billion loan from the IMF – all actions that would have been unthinkable from 2007 to 2017. Ultimately, giving Julian Assange asylum was politically costly and brought no benefits to a government that’s too weak to waste political capital on an international troublemaker. Recent events may have triggered his ouster from the embassy, but the writing has been on the wall for some time now.

* John Polga-Hecimovich is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the U.S. Naval Academy. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of or endorsement by the Naval Academy, the Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.