Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa said on Monday that his government will decide "with absolute sovereignty" whether or not to grant Edward Snowden asylum. Correa's government has already granted asylum to Julian Assange - the founder of WikiLeaks who is wanted in Sweden for questioning over rape and sexual harassment crimes - at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, against the wishes of Britain. Ecuador's foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, confirmed Monday morning that Snowden had indeed requested asylum and said Ecuador was in talks with Russia over Snowden while also reviewing a request from the United States to deny him asylum.
"Hello country and the world," Correa wrote on Twitter. "As usual, another complicated week. Rest assured that we will very responsibly analyze the Snowden case and make with absolute sovereignty whatever decision we believe most adequate."
Correa, an avowed leftist and populist with strong ties to other similarly inclined governments in Latin America, such as that of Evo Morales in Bolivia and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, obtained a Ph.D in economics from the University of Illinois, and has referred to that time in the United States as the "happiest four years of my life".
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In 2010, three years after he took office, security forces abandoned their posts and seized their barracks in protest of new laws standardizing pay for public employees - and curtailing pay and benefits for police. Correa went down to one of the barracks and, in response to jeering policemen, bared his chest and dared them to kill him. He was hit with tear gas in the subsequent scuffle and taken to the hospital, where he was detained by the protestors for nine hours before special forces freed him. Correa refers to the incident as an attempted coup, though no officers stepped forward to proclaim a new government.
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In April 2011, WikiLeaks made public cables from the American ambassador, Heather M. Hodges, in which she said Correa was appointing a corrupt police chief in order to have someone "whom he could easily manipulate". In response, Correa expelled Hodges, and the United States retaliated by doing the same with the Ecuadorian ambassador. Since then, relations between Ecuador have remained icy.
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Snowden, the former NSA agent who leaked classified details of two US government surveillance programs to the press, is accused of espionage by the US government, which seeks his extradition. He was earlier hiding out in Hong Kong, which had denied the United States' extradition request, saying it was not in line with terms specified by an extradition treaty between the two countries. Snowden fled to Moscow and was expected to board a flight to Cuba Monday morning, part of a series of flights which would have taken him from Havana to Venezuela and finally to Ecuador.
In his letter to Correa, Snowden wrote he was requesting asylum in Ecuador "because of the risk of being persecuted by the government of the United States and its agents...in relation to my decision to make public serious violations...As a result of my political opinions, and my desire to exercise my freedom of speech...the government of the United States has publicly announced a criminal investigation against me." The New York Times reported that Snowden also made reference in the letter to the fact that charges were filed against him by the Justice Department in the same district which conducted the Justice Department investigation against WikiLeaks. The letter concluded, "I believe that, given these circumstances, it is unlikely that I would receive a fair trial or proper treatment prior to that trial, and face the possibility of life in prison or even death."
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