politics...work...blah blah blah

After a summer filled with travel (DC, Pittsburgh, and Greece) I’m back to a normal routine in Quito. This week rounded out my fourth as a full time fellow at Asylum Access Ecuador, and because of an unexpected vacancy at the office, I’ve already been promoted to legal services director. I’m very excited about the job. It should be a good mix of supervising our legal staff, planning strategic litigation and policy advocacy, and tons of direct legal services. Because of the lack of services in general in Ecuador, my job requires a lot of patience and creativity. Things that should be simple, like filing a police report after having one’s refugee ID document stolen are often a bureaucratic nightmare.

It doesn’t help that many of our clients have debilitating psychological problems stemming from past persecution. A few days ago I was helping a severely traumatized refugee file a police report after a robbery. While we were sitting in a tiny concrete room in the police station, another man filing a report asked to go to the bathroom. The secretary told him the door was stuck and handed him an 8 inch butcher knife they keep in the office to pry open the door. The sight of a strange man brandishing a large knife scared my client so badly that we had to physically restrain her to keep her from running out of the room screaming. The fact that you need a deadly weapon to use the bathroom in the office where you seek help after being assaulted would be funny, if it weren’t such a serious oversight in the way things should work.

It’s not surprising that low level bureaucratic tasks are exceedingly complicated, given the way the top levels of the government deal with crises. The two biggest controversies of the past few weeks both involve high-level corruption. Several weeks ago a secret tape came out implicating President Correa and several of his confidants in a secret alteration of the text of the proposed constitution before it was presented for public referendum. Since the Constitution is 218 pages long, nobody noticed the alleged changes and now they are part of the supreme law of the land. (The changes were mostly pragmatic—“the government will promote” rather than “guarantee” food security—but still should have been approved by the Constitutional Assembly, rather than dictated by the President). The other big controversy was that after 19 years of legal battles and a potential $28 billon damage award for dumping toxic waste into the Amazon, another secret video recording came out implicating the judge in the Chevron-Texaco case of bribery and corruption.

So how does the Ecuadorian government respond to these serious accusations? By prosecuting the people who made and published the recordings, and proposing a new communications law that imposes heavy penalties for reporting on facts obtained from clandestine recordings. Teleamazonas, the station that first broadcast the recording of President Correa, will now likely be shut down for at least 90 days and possible permanently. By refocusing the debate on whether the evidence of the wrongdoing was improperly obtained, almost all of the news surrounding these two controversies has revolved around the act of making the recordings, rather than their content.

This has added fuel to fire in the battle between the media and the President, who they view as launching an attack on public information. Today El Comercio published a poll asking Ecuadorians why they don’t like Correa. Number one answer… “because of the way he is” coming in at 20.5%.

Nonetheless, as far as Latin American leaders go, Correa seems to be very smart, generally well intentioned, not too terribly corrupt, and still pretty well liked in a country with a notoriously short patience for its leaders. And his progressive policies regarding human rights, migration and refugee law all make my job a lot easier than my experience working on immigrant rights in the U.S., which often feels like banging one’s head against the concrete walls of an immigration detention center.

OK, enough ranting…it’s a beautiful day and Monique will be back from a trip to DC soon, so I’m going to head to the market. Hopefully I can avoid the indigenous uprising planned to shut down the country this weekend. Hasta pronto,

D&M