by MATT KENNARD
Declassified sits down with the former president of Ecuador who granted Julian Assange asylum in London. He talks about dealing with the British, how the US seeks to control his country and the lawfare campaign against him.
- “The British are used to being obeyed, not to negotiate with a third-world country. They tried to deal with us like a subordinate country.”
- “Assange didn’t have any possibility of a fair legal process in the United States.”
- “We engaged a special security company in order to protect the London embassy, to protect Julian Assange…They were captured by the CIA.”
- “I cancelled the agreement to have an American base in our country in 2009. These are things that the American authorities do not forgive.”
On a cloudy Saturday morning in the middle of June 2012, Australian journalist Julian Assange walked into the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge, London.
He was a hunted man. Over the past two years, he’d been revealing the secrets, in alliance with the world’s largest newspapers, of the US’s so-called War on Terror, an extraordinary explosion of violence which had been raging for more than a decade.
Britain’s Supreme Court had days before approved his extradition to Sweden to be questioned over sexual assault allegations, for which he was never charged. The case was dropped in 2019 after a review of the evidence.
This obscure embassy in London had barely garnered a single line in the news media in its history. But over the next seven years it would become a global story involving assassination plots, industrial levels of surveillance, and finally the British police forcibly evicting Assange in April 2019.
When Assange walked into the embassy, the president of Ecuador was Rafael Correa, a US-trained economist who had assumed power five years before in 2007. He was a key figure in the “pink tide” of left-wing governments that took office across Latin America in the 2000s and would serve for a decade.
Correa is now living in Brussels, Belgium, after himself being granted political asylum to avoid persecution by Ecuador, the state he once headed.
In an ironic twist of fate, Correa and Assange, who has been in maximum-security Belmarsh prison for three and a half years, now share a lawyer as they both battle extradition. We are meeting at the offices of this lawyer. A giant Free Assange sign greets visitors at the entrance.
In a dark wood panelled room looking out onto the street, Correa tells me of that June day his foreign minister told him Assange had entered the embassy in London. “We started studying his case,” Correa says.
In August 2012 – “after two months of studying his dossier” – Correa’s government granted Assange asylum to protect him from persecution by the US government for his journalistic activities.
“There was not any possibility for him to have a fair process, that was not possible,” Correa says. “I refer to the United States, there was too much public pressure, government pressure, media pressure against him.”
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