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Ecuador: Tightening the Muzzle
Ecuador’s state newspaper El Telégrafo has cost the public sector at least $28.4 million since 2007, according to one estimate.
LATINVEX SPECIAL
Analytica
A year after Ecuador passed its controversial
media law, the Ley Orgánica de Comunicación (LOC), most of the fears
that it provoked as a potential instrument of repression have come true.
Freedom House, a US non-governmental organization that supports liberal
democracy, since last year has rated Ecuador's press as "not free"
and Internet usage as only "partially free," but notes an aggravation
of attacks on private media under the new law. This will likely continue, as
will the double standards in its application, with government controlled-media
free to attack real or perceived opponents.
President Rafael Correa, as part of the self-described "21st-Century Socialist" group of political leaders, describes state supervision of media as part of revolutionary change aimed at benefitting the majorities rather than traditional oligarchies. This has led to discrimination of banks and media companies in particular. The government's claims however lack academic proof, and have become hard to sustain amid alienation of the ideological left from his political project. The media law defines freedom of the press as a "public service" and public good rather than an individual right, and planned constitutional reform aims to cement this (it will probably pass without a referendum, though the 2008 constitution he originally championed forbids reduction of rights, which would imply the need for yet another new constitution). A newspaper columnist commented that the concept of the media as a "public service," which the government seeks to put into the constitution to legitimize the media law retroactively, originally stems from the likes of Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco. After Correa's chief of staff, Vinicio Alvarado, superficially replied to this by saying these fascist dictators "couldn't have been all bad," he blamed the television anchorwoman who had interviewed him for misquoting him, although the media went to great lengths to quote him verbatim.
One point consistently overlooked by those who claim to fight a private
"media monopoly" is that major newspapers and television broadcasters
require a sizeable investment to establish, given the cost of printing presses
and television studios, among other required fixed installations. Hence, a
non-oligopolistic market isn't economically feasible, although of course
ownership could be broken up by spreading shares more widely. Meanwhile, Quito
newspaper Hoy and Guayaquil newspaper El Telégrafo have become
symbols of the discrepancies in fates between private and government print
products. The former was founded in 1982 as a more liberal alternative to El
Comercio. While influential in public opinion, particularly in criticizing
the conservative-populist regime of León
Febres Cordero (1984-1988) that saw numerous human rights violations, and
an early adopter of cutting-edge technology, it never managed to overtake its
older rival, frequently registering losses. Last month, its publisher, Jaime Mantilla, pulled the plug on the
daily print edition, moving most production online, blaming the hostility of the
government and the discriminatory limits on media investment for the move. In Hoy's
farewell editorial for the print edition, it also said that the government
refused to advertise in the paper and that it had lost its contracts to print schoolbooks.
Unsurprisingly, government officials blasted Mantilla for his comments; beyond
this however, government-controlled media heaped the blame on his management of
the newspaper, publishing detailed financial information that showed years of
losses at Hoy. To top it off, a week after the announcement, Hoy received
a $57,800 fine from the "Supercom" media regulator for printing its
circulation data on page 9, rather than page one. On the one hand, this looks
like the perfect example of media campaign or "media lynching"
prohibited by the media law. On the other, El Telégrafo, which became
state property amid the bank failures of the 1998-2000 financial crisis and
functions as a government mouthpiece, has refused to make public its own
accounts. Exiled Ecuadorian journalist Emilio Palacio estimates that running El
Telégrafo has cost the public sector at least $28.4 million since 2007.
Santiago León, its chief executive, in a leaked document acknowledged a loss of
more than $3 million in the first five months of 2014 alone. Supercom meanwhile
has hired 225 staffers to oversee the industry, plus external contractors like Rommel Jurado, a former legislative
aide who worked on the law, who has won some $200,000 in consulting fees.
While obligatory national broadcasts called "cadenas nacionales"
continue to impose government content on radio and television, the
administration appears to be finding a mechanism to act similarly in the case
of print media. After Correa came home from a May trip to Santiago de Chile,
where he received his 11th honorary doctorate, he complained that the media had
failed to inform the public adequately. Promptly, Carlos Vera, head of a self-proclaimed citizen media watchdog,
complained to Supercom that newspapers La Hora, El Comercio, Hoy,
and El Universo had failed to cover the trip "in sufficient detail
and space." Vera denied any ties to the government, but previously worked
for it. Each newspaper published reports of the trip gleaned from international
newswire services, including Agence
France Press. Correa probably wanted them to report on his doctoral
speech and the ceremony at greater length, although all he did was boast of his
government's achievements for the nth time, as he did in his speeches before
university audiences in the US a few months earlier.
Ironically, more coverage of the real news is hardly what Correa should have
demanded. He complained to Chilean public television that he had had to bribe a
journalist in 1985 to get coverage of an event he had organized as a student
leader. In a radio interview, he sparked a diplomatic row by gratuitously
getting involved in Latin America's most protracted border dispute, saying that
he supported Bolivia's demand for sovereign access to the Pacific Ocean through
Chilean territory. More than anything, the interview highlighted the
president's lack of understanding of the historic and development questions
involved in the dispute between the two countries, which is currently being
discussed before the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Correa later
clarified that what he had supported was integration and access to the coast
for Bolivia, which, as he appears not to know, the 1904 treaty of limits
already grants, as well as Paraguayan access to the Atlantic. For Chile, the
anger over his comments was enough for president Michelle Bachelet, also a socialist, to send her defense minister, Jorge Burgos, to Quito to complain.
Here, the coverage may reflect growing self-censorship. Newspaper editors
received tips that Burgos would have liked to explain Chile's position in the
border disputes, but they didn't take up the matter. In the case of anti-mining
protests in Íntag, television broadcaster Ecuavisa already publicly
stated that it decided not to present its footage due to the threat of
government sanctions.
In the meantime, the regulators – besides Supercom, a board called Cordicom –
have unsurprisingly raised eyebrows, and even suffered ridicule. A foolish suit
by Sandra Correa helped Supercom
make a show of independence. Correa, unrelated to the president but a
sympathizer of his administration, was education minister of populist president
Abdalá Bucaram (1996-1997) and
sentenced to three years in jail in 2006. In her complaint, she accused a radio
talk show host of "media lynching" for failing to censor guests who
commented on the case. Supercom struck down her plea because of retroactivity
(she now claims mentioning her case constitutes a "hate crime").
But Supercom, before the fine it imposed on Hoy, quickly became an
international reference for the absurd when it ordered caricaturist Xavier Bonilla to "correct" a
caricature of a police search of an opposition activist's apartment and fined
its publisher, El Universo, $90,000 for failing to censor him. In April,
it fined tabloid Extra for publishing a female model in string underwear
from behind in its usual "sexy Monday" edition, calling her a
"filly," as well as for its reporting on the death of two staffers of
a Riobamba university in a car crash.
Intimidation also takes other forms. After Guayaquil newspaper Expreso quoted
the director of a private clinic in the port city complaining of late pay from
the state-run social security institute (IESS), the government denied the story
with a cadena, and IESS reacted by inspecting labor conditions at Expreso
and the clinic. This week, Cordicom warned media of the need to be careful
in reporting on a controversial bill on financial reform. While local media can
expect the regulators to step up their investigation of whether they are
complying with stringent new minimum local content rules in advertising and
radio, government online newswire Andes features advertising in British English
by German athletic goods company Adidas.
To summarize, "in the past months, the situation of freedom of expression
in Ecuador has deteriorated at an accelerated rate, to the point at which it is
in danger of definitive extinction," says local journalism advocacy
organization Fundamedios – also an object of harsh government criticism.
This commentary originally appeared in
