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President of Ecuador to Pardon Four in Libel Case →
In the ongoing saga of the fallout from the courtroom victory of Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa and newspaper El Universo, President Correa has now officially announced that he will pardon all those sentenced to jail terms and forgive the 42 million dollar judgment against the paper.
The above-linked article from the New York Times has none of the drama of the McClatchy piece that I linked to a few days ago. The reporters here — William Neuman with Maggy Ayala contributing from Quito, Ecuador — might have given a fuller story if they had filled in some of the detail that appeared in the McClatchy article.
Readers will construct a moral for this story based upon the understanding they have the situation, but there really isn’t enough in the public record to draw a definitive moral. President Correa looks bad in this because of the harshness of the judgment, but he also looks good because he pardoned all involved, and can now publicly claim that he was only in it for the truth. The President says that the press has always been prejudiced against him in favor of entrenched interests and that it has traditionally been the entrenched interests represented by the papers that have pressured judges in Ecuador.
The convicted journalist and newspaper publishers, all of whom sought refuge outside Ecuador, look like they were fleeing justice, but now claim that President Correa issued the pardons because of political pressure brought to bear upon him. They may benefit from public sentiment that often favors the underdog, but I don’t know enough about public perceptions in Ecuador to guess how much of an impact that can have.
It will be interesting to see whether the corruption charges that emerged from the case will be pursued or dropped, and whether careers will have been destroyed. Does President Correa emerge from this strengthened? I at least cannot think of a way that it weakened him.
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