The Numantine spirit of Julian Assange was confirmed for this newspaper in May 2013 in the claustrophobic living room of his improvised home in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
"Do you have an exit strategy?" we asked the founder of Wikileaks in reference to his new red brick prison in the Knightsbridge district, surrounded by a ring of armed bobbies. "No. I just had a strategy to get in," he responded, referring to his entry into the embassy a year earlier. The priority - he explained - had been "to obtain the recognition of a state regarding the situation faced by Wikileaks."
Ecuador, a small Andean country, faced with the superpower that persecutes Assange, was precisely that State. Under the government of President Rafael Correa, Ecuador had honored "a long tradition in terms of asylum and refuge," as explained Thursday by Ambassador Fernando Yépez, a Correa ally who was transferred to London to help protect Assange. The decision to grant asylum to Assange was "carefully examined and analyzed."
In another world - one in which the United Kingdom was not the United States' junior partner - Assange would have been transferred from the embassy to Heathrow airport to spend his political asylum in the middle of the Andes.
As Assange explained that day, according to all jurisprudence, asylum has legal priority over an extradition treaty such as the one cited in the request by Swedish prosecutors to try Assange in Stockholm on a dubious rape charge.
Of course, the extradition that made Assange's departure impossible was not the Swedish one - soon the accusation of statutory rape would be dropped - but the one that was being prepared in Washington.
Assange would remain in the embassy for another six years. When Correa's vice president, Lenin Moreno, won the elections in 2017, it was logical to think that asylum would remain. After all, Moreno was the candidate of the same party as Correa, and everything indicated that he would defend Wikileaks with the same commitment as the previous government. But it was not like that.
As soon as he settled in the presidential headquarters in Quito, Moreno began to launch accusations against Assange for using the embassy as "a spy center", for criticizing other states allied to Ecuador, for his personal habits and for alleged abuse of officials. from the embassy.
At the same time, the new Moreno government attacked the founder of Wikileaks for defending inconvenient causes such as the Catalan process and the right to decide on the independence of Catalonia. The Spanish government joined the US in expressing its disagreement with the asylum granted to the journalist. "Julian Assange was not a figure that generated sympathy in the circles of the Spanish Government or governments in general or in the hegemonic media," Yépez explained in a telephone interview.
Finally, in April 2019, Moreno gave the green light for the British police to enter the embassy to arrest the founder of Wikileaks. He was transferred to a prison in London and then to the high-security Belmarsh penitentiary.
"Moreno totally changed the political line of the Government of Ecuador, he made a foreign policy totally servile and supervised by the United States and this has its maximum expression when he cancels Assange's asylum," says Yépez. "Allowing British police into our embassy is an illegal and ignominious act that violates our Constitution."
To reassure Ecuadorian deputies who feared for Assange's future, the then chancellor of Moreno's government, José Valencia, appeared in Congress to explain that there were guarantees that Assange would not be extradited to the US. "It was a setup to misinform," explains Yépez.
It is not known exactly what pressure was exerted on Moreno to hand over Assange. Mike Pence, Trump's vice president, had visited Quito a few weeks earlier, "they probably talked about this," Yépez said.
According to Assange's wife, Stella Moris, Mike Pompeo, the former CIA director and secretary of state in the Donald Trump Administration, had instructed agents to explore the possibility of assassinating Assange inside the embassy. As Wikileaks' Mark Summers explained last week, Trump asked for "detailed options for assassinating Trump."
If it had been only the Trump administration that wanted to take down Assange, perhaps there would be more support for the Wikileaks founder in the mainstream media. But the leak during the 2016 presidential campaign of thousands of emails from Democratic czar John Podesta - a close ally of Hillary Clinton - unleashed the most powerful conspiracy theory of the decade. Assange was a crony of Vladimir Putin who wanted to sabotage Clinton's campaign.
"The Democrats loved Assange when he published what happened in Iraq, but then he published - as is the duty of a journalist - Podesta's emails," said Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, who attended Assange's trial this week. week.
There are now increasing indications that the so-called Russiagate scandal was a hoax created by the Democratic apparatus to criminalize Trump. Even the 2019 Mueller report on Russiagate states that "insufficient evidence has been found that WikiLeaks knew (of Russia's attempts to hack Podesta)." Wikileaks most likely received Podesta's emails from a Democratic rebel.
But for Lenin Moreno, the journalistic "investigations" that invented an alleged conspiracy hatched by Putin and Assange were one more alibi to hand the journalist over to the wolves.
