Whose Rights? Freedom-of-Expression Critiques of Ecuadorian Media Democratization

• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18760299
• Author: Christian Tym
• Subject Matter: Articles

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 220, Vol. 45 No. 3, May 2018, 68–85

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18760299

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

68

Whose Rights?

Freedom-of-Expression Critiques of Ecuadorian

Media Democratization

by

Christian Tym

Despite its media reforms designed to democratize the country’s media landscape, the

Ecuadorian government has been subject to constant condemnation from major U.S.-

based human rights organizations on freedom-of-expression grounds. A close examination

of these critiques and the Ecuadorian media reforms to which they correspond and a com-

parison of the Ecuadorian government’s and critical human rights organizations’ posi-

tions with liberal scholarship on the right to freedom of expression leads to the conclusion

that Ecuadorian media reform is consistent with liberal social-democratic principles and,

by contrast, human rights organizations uphold an early-modern interpretation of liberal-

ism that is marginal within scholarship on freedom of expression.

A pesar de su programa de reformas para democratizar el campo de los medios de

difusión, el gobierno ecuatoriano ha sido objeto de una condena permanente por parte de

las principales organizaciones de los derechos humanos de los Estados Unidos por motivos

de la libertad de expresión. Un examen minucioso de estas críticas y de las reformas del

gobierno ecuatoriano, así como una comparación de las posiciones del gobierno ecuatori-

ano y las de las organizaciones de derechos humanos con los estudios liberales sobre el

derecho a la libertad de expression, revelan que estas reformas son consistentes con los

principios liberales y socialdemócratas y que, en cambio, las organizaciones de derechos

humanos defienden una interpretación del liberalismo correspondiente al principio de la

era moderna temprana que queda marginal dentro de los estudios sobre la libertad de

expresión.

Keywords: Ecuador, Media reform, Human Rights Watch, Freedom of expression,

Liberalism

It is one of the serious global problems: private businesses engaged in social communi-

cation—providing a public good fundamental to society—an essential contradiction.

—Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa

It is a curious feature of Anglophone media coverage of Latin America that

some of the strongest criticisms of the region’s governments have been reserved

Christian Tym is a recent Ph.D. graduate at the University of Sydney who has spent the past three

years researching Ecuadorian politics, Amazonian medical anthropology, and the intercultural

and plurinational state.

760299LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18760299Latin American PerspectivesTym / Whose Rights? CRITIQUES OF MEDIA DEMOCRATIZATION IN ECUADOR

research-article2018

Tym / WHOSE RIGHTS? CRITIQUES OF MEDIA DEMOCRATIZATION IN ECUADOR 69

for some of the most progressive among them. This can be partially explained

with reference to the cooperation between establishment media and centers of

political power. Leftist governments in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia have

funded high levels of social investment in their impoverished countries largely

by claiming higher shares of natural resource rents (Cunha and Santaella, 2010:

181–183; Katz, 2015: 32–34; Ramírez, 2016). This poses a direct threat to U.S.-

based multinational corporations, particularly in the hydrocarbon sector

(Berrios, Marak, and Morgenstern, 2011: 680; Ramírez, 2016), whose overlap-

ping ownership with the establishment media can be revealed by a cursory

examination of the major shareholdings of the two sectors (Tym, 2014). Further

nuance to our understanding of the interrelationship between communications

media and centers of political power has been added by Herman and Chomsky

(2010 [1988]: 1–2). with their notion of “filters,” and Freedman (2015: 282), who

in discussing media control pairs the role of economic interests with the

Foucauldian notion of the symbolic and discursive saturation of reality.

Similar attention has not been given to the role played by the most authorita-

tive sources for the media in their coverage of Latin America and other for-

merly colonized regions, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other human rights

observatories with global scope. Because human rights discourse tends to

replace consideration of society as a whole with social justice understood as a

program of minimal guarantees for the individual, its geopolitical exploitation

is not new and has been noted in previous studies (Farrell and McDermott,

2005; Hairong and Sautman, 2013: 151). The phenomenon dates back at least to

British colonial administration in Africa in the early twentieth century

(Ibhawoh, 2007) and continued to make its presence felt in 2015 with the U.S.

State Department sanctions against Venezuela putatively in protest against

human rights violations even though the White House later admitted its decla-

ration was “completely pro forma” (Neuman, 2015).

The harmony between the priorities of the North Atlantic powers’ interests

in Latin America and the work of HRW is surprising given that the organiza-

tion developed much of its credibility and raison d’être through the staunch

opposition to Washington’s Latin America policies of one of its precursors,

Americas Watch (Slezkine, 2014: 357). More recently, however, HRW has con-

centrated its fire on the United States’ official enemies: against Venezuela

under the Chávez and Maduro governments and against Ecuador, most

noticeably since the scandals surrounding Julian Assange and Edward

Snowden. In the case of Ecuador, in response to Assange’s decision to seek

refuge in its London embassy, the director of HRW’s Americas Division, José

Miguel Vivanco, said, “I think this is ironic that you have a journalist, or an

activist, seeking political asylum from a government that has—after Cuba—

the poorest record of free speech in the region” (Braiker, 2012). Such criticisms

of the state of freedom of expression have been largely constitutive of the so-

called bad-left categorization (Young, 2013: 210), which tars the democratic

credentials of popular governments and those of Ecuador and Venezuela in

particular. The continual denunciation of the state of freedom of expression in

these countries is extraordinary in light of the threats faced by journalists in

Mexico, Colombia, and Honduras—all close allies of the United States—who